


Paradise

by Lassenby



Series: Dog's Paw [1]
Category: Borderlands
Genre: Abusive Parent, Brick's missing sister, M/M, Romance, Self-Discovery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-22
Updated: 2014-11-25
Packaged: 2018-02-18 07:38:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 42,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2340392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lassenby/pseuds/Lassenby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brick has a secret arrangement with Mordecai, and gets a new lead in the search for his sister. (first Dog's Paw story)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Stray

Brick walked through New Haven at sunset, feeling the day's heat leech out of sand. Buildings spanned above him, haphazardly stacked wherever the construction could bear the weight, dark against the purpling sky. The townsfolk had built upward rather than out to make the town easier to defend against wildlife and bandits, which Brick liked just fine. It made for a shorter walk home when he was piss drunk and stumbling, like now.

From somewhere in the shadows came a shrill adolescent laugh. The sound made Brick's lip curl. He recognized it immediately as the earmark of teenage cruelty, which, in his experience, was usually directed toward dogs. He paused in the road, head cocked, listening for the source of the laughter.

He followed it into a nearby alley and squinted into the darkness between the buildings. Teenagers stood in a semi-circle, their aggression plain from the way they stood and poked and wheedled. But the target of their aggression was not a dog, as Brick had thought. They had a girl backed against the tin siding of a building- just a skinny, stray mutt of a girl.

"Fuck you," she snarled. Her hand was balled in a tight fist. Something silver dangled through her fingers and flashed in the dying light.

"Hey, if you wanna, we'd be happy to oblige," a gangling boy leered. They all laughed at that; even the one girl in the gang let out a big, overblown bray. Brick guessed that the gangling wise-ass was their leader.

The young girl grinned. "You virgins wouldn't know what to do with me."

She couldn't have been older than thirteen. Brick chuckled, quietly enough that the kids didn't hear him, but the girl's eyes flicked up to meet his.

Around the circle, teenagers exclaimed and elbowed each other. The gangling kid's face flushed red and he straightened up, so he ceased to be gangling and became an imposing, angry youth who towered over the lone girl. Brick tensed. The boy grabbed her wrist and wrenched it up. His other hand pried at her white knuckled fingers. She tried to jerk away, but the boy was twice her size and held her tight. Brick stepped into the mouth of the alley.

"Hey!" he called out.

The teenagers turned to gawk at him.  _They must be shitting themselves right now,_  Brick thought. He knew how he looked: his massive frame silhouetted in the alleyway, with shoulders so wide that he had to shimmy sideways past a jutting pipe, his face a mangled map of scars. The bullies gaped at him, eyes wide. But the stray mutt, the girl...she only glared.

"Ged'off her," he said.

"You drunk, old man?" The gangling boy jeered. Only the whites of his eyes, bright in the gloom, betrayed his fear.

"Might be," Brick chuckled, as he came to a stop before the ringleader. "Could still kick the shit out of you, ya' little piece of-"

He hadn't noticed the kid's hand creeping into his pocket, or the girl's warning look. The boy's narrow wrist darted out, pale in the moonlight, and Brick caught it just before the blade would have connected with his gut. His massive hand closed around the boy's smaller one and was slashed by the knife's edge. Warmth filled his palm.

 _Shit, that was close_. Brick hadn't equipped his energy shield tonight. He'd half expected to stumble back to Mordecai's apartment instead of his own and hadn't wanted to forget it there.

Brick's animal, which had been dozing, drugged by booze and familiar territory, stirred.  _Shush,_  he told it automatically. He wouldn't need to cower behind its red hide tonight. He could take care of this business on his own. His uninjured hand shot up, and he brought his fist down on the side of the gangling kid's head, sending him sprawling into the dirt.

Brick's palm stung like a sonofabitch as the knife slid out. He hissed and shook his hand, spattering the girl with blood, but she didn't flinch. The other teenagers stepped back as their boss fell. On the ground, the gangling boy groaned, and Brick kicked him in the ribs.

"Get outt'a here, already. What're you waiting for?" he said to the cowering bullies.

They seemed to wake up. They looked around and, finding the same terrified expression mirrored on the other's faces, and their leader indisposed, they scurried past Brick with sidelong, worried glances. As the last boy went by, Brick faked like he was going to punch him. The boy yelped. Brick laughed, and turned his attention to the small, unafraid girl. She wiped her cheek with her wrist, smearing the blood across her dark skin. With the sunset caught in her eyes, they seemed to glow red, and her short, kinky hair stuck out like smoke. She looked like a girl full of fire.

"I could have taken care of them myself," she growled.

"Don't be a cliché, kid," Brick said.

He plucked the trinket out of her unsuspecting hand and held it up to view in the last strip of light falling into the alley. The girl gasped and jumped to grab it back, but Brick held the object out of her reach. The chain twisted slowly in his grasp, flashing in the light, and he studied the single pendant. His breath caught.

"Where'd you get this?"

"None of your business," the girl hissed, and clawed at him like a feral cat. He shoved her away absently, smearing her with blood from his injured hand.

"Listen, kid, you better tell me. I saved your ass."

She glared up at him. "I have a gun. I saved up for it myself, bought it from the machine. I...I could'a shot them, if I had to."

Brick shook his head. "What were you gonna tell their folks? 'You don' understand, lady, they tried to steal my necklace, so I  _had_ to murder your boys.' That's dumb. You can't fix all your problems with guns." The irony of the claim was not lost on Brick, who'd killed more men than he could count. The girl hesitated, then sighed.

"If I tell you, will you give it back?"

Brick shrugged. "Maybe."

Another pause, but she really had no choice.

"It was my mom's. I don't know where she got it. Why do you care, anyway?"

Brick held up the necklace around his own neck, showing her the key that hung from it, the perfect twin of the one he still dangled out of her reach. Of course, there was no way for him to check the lock that the keys belonged to. That was on another world, light years away from Pandora. The girl's eyes, now brown in the shadows, widened.

"Is it the same one? Do they open something good? Worth credits?"

Brick snorted. "Nah, no creds. Forget it."

"Okay, give it back then. I'll find out myself," she said, and leaped for it again, but fell short by a couple feet. Brick balled up the chain in his fist.

"Sorry, kid. I gotta keep it."

"What?" the girl cried. "You said-"

"I said 'maybe', and it turns out that I need it. So bug off." He swung his arms down to his sides, one huge hand still clenched tightly around the key. The girl looked like she might cry for a moment, but then her gaze turned steely.

"I'll get it back," she spat. "I'll find you."

Brick's shoulders rolled in another seismic shrug. "You prob'ly will. It's a small town."

He turned and lumbered off, feeling the girl's eyes burning holes in the back of his neck. He was halfway to Mordecai's apartment when he remembered that his first impression of the girl had been that of a stray dog, and wondered if she was so attached to the necklace because her mother was dead. Pandora was full of orphans. Even in a town like New Haven, protected by the Crimson Raiders - Brick included - didn't guarantee safety on such a dangerous border planet.

Brick realized, finally, that he should have waited around the corner and followed the girl. If her mother was alive, he could have asked her about the necklace. The key was his first lead to finding his sister since he'd arrived on the planet two years ago, and he'd already blown it.  _Fuck, oh well. She said she'd find me._  Brick stretched his wounded hand. It was burning up, and throbbed when he moved it.

Outside Mordecai's apartment, Brick paused to string the new key onto his necklace. It slid down to rest beside his own key and Priscilla's paw. He fumbled with it for a moment, nearly dropped it through the slatted stairs, but caught it. He hung it back around his neck.

Mordecai's lights were out, which was no surprise. His friend acted just like a bird, in respect; he slept when the sun went down and woke with the first light. Brick cracked open his door without knocking. The hinges creaked as the door swung inward. Mordecai never got around to oiling them, and claimed that it was because he liked to hear anyone creeping in. Brick knew that he would be awake now, listening from the bedroom.

A screech made Brick jump. Bloodwing swooped down at him from the rafters. He held up a hand automatically to swat her away, but there was no need, because she veered up as she recognized him. Flapping, she came to rest on the windowsill behind Brick, and glared as though he'd intended to make a fool of her. He stuck his tongue out at the bird.

" _Baboso,_ what are you doing here? You scared the shit out of Blood," Mordecai groaned, and slouched against the hall doorway.

His dreads fell loose across his shoulders, and he wore an oversize gray tank-top over blue boxers. He yawned and scratched under the hem of his shirt, and for a second Brick caught a glimpse of the thin trail of dark hair that ran up to his navel. He swallowed.

"Sorry to bug ya'. I had a little accident."

When he held up his bloody hand, he could hear Mordecai's sharp intake of breath from all the way across the room. Brick had not, in fact, come here because of the injury. That was just an excuse. His feet had plotted to carry him to Mordecai's apartment before the shit went down in the alley, and maybe even before he drank too much during movie night at Lilith's, because it was just easier if his head wasn't screwed on tight. Without letting himself think about it, he'd come for the other thing.

But now Brick really did need to get his hand taken care of. It hurt to hell. The kid's knife had been a dirty, jagged piece of garbage, and the wound already throbbed with the sick heat of infection. Mordecai led him down the hall to the bathroom. The place was a mess. His toilet never worked, not in the two months since he moved in, and he'd opted not to deal with it, instead using Brick's next door.

Brown water ran out of the tap for a full minute before it was clear enough for Brick to thrust his hand under. The chipped white sink turned red as it filled with blood. Brick looked away as Mordecai poured a capful of peroxide over the gash.

"I'm not gonna waste a kit on this scratch," he said. "How'd it happen, anyway?"

"Kid stabbed me."

"What? Who stabbed you?" Mordecai asked while he rubbed ointment on the cut. It must have been some of Doctor Zed's miracle crap after all, because it itched maddeningly for a moment as the torn tissue knitted itself back together. Still, Mordecai wrapped a bandage tightly around the hand to keep out infection while the ointment finished its work overnight.

"Just some kid. Don't worry, I punched his lights out."

" _You punched his lights out?_ " Mordecai repeated, alarmed.

"What, is there an echo in here? He had it comin', Mordy! He and his pussy gang had a girl cornered, and he stabbed me. I thought you'd care more about that."

"I care. You know I care. I'm just worried about the brat's mommy busting down my door in the morning, looking for the brute who rearranged her son's face. Did you at least get him home safe?"

"Uh..." Actually, Brick had forgotten about him. The kid was probably still lying in the alley.

Mordecai raised an eyebrow. He had beautiful eyebrows- strong, clear and expressive, with long eyelashes, too. Brick thought it was a shame that he nearly always hid them behind goggles. After too long of a pause, Mordecai sighed and rolled his eyes.

"Oh well. You're done, by the way."

He prodded Brick's palm, and it didn't hurt where his finger pressed against the bandage. The touch transported Brick, just for a moment, to the memory of a kiss placed on the bunched lines of his palm. He shivered.

"You staying the night?" Mordecai asked.

"Yeah. It was hard enough to get here. 'm pretty drunk." Although the worst of his buzz had disappeared in the alley, parted by the steel through his hand.

Mordecai waved a hand across his nose, the universal gesture for something smelling bad. "I can tell from your breath. But...your apartment is just across the way."

"You wan' me to go, then?"

They stared at each other for a long moment, daring the other to say it first.  _Let's just do it,_ Brick thought.  _You know you want to. The bathroom is small, but not that small. Not so small that you have to press up against me, breathing on my neck._ But he didn't say anything. Mordecai looked away.

"Nah, you can stay. I..." he cleared his throat. "You know how I sleep, though."

He meant naked. It was a lie, and Brick knew it. He had been sleeping before Brick got there, wearing that preposterously large tanktop, which Brick now recognized as his own, left on some previous occasion, and a pair of boxers. Mordecai only slept naked when Brick was over. It was a ridiculously thin guise, but it made them both feel better, so where was the harm?

Men can only go so long without sex. Mordecai said that over a year ago, the first time he and Brick had fooled around, to convince him, or to convince himself. As long as they didn't kiss...as long as it was just sex...

Mordecai snapped his fingers. "You really are out of it. You okay?"

Brick blinked. "'m fine. You go ahead, I'll meet you."

That was another rule. They couldn't just take off their clothes and climb into bed together. One of them had to be there first, and the other could come in, as if it were some kind of bizarre accident. Like that made it less gay.

Mordecai slipped out of the bathroom, and Brick counted aloud, quietly, to thirty-Mississippi. He got impatient around twenty-two and dropped the Mississippi, which still left Mordecai plenty of time to get into bed. Brick stripped off his own clothes and abandoned them in a heap on the bathroom floor.

He ducked into the dark bedroom. Mordecai lay on the cot, facing the wall, covered to the waist by a blanket. Silver light slanted through the blinds and fell across his back, illuminating his slender shoulder blades. They rose and fell with the man's even breathing. He'd fallen asleep.

He was fucking beautiful, and it made Brick's heart ache. The rules were stupid. Sometimes he could see it clearly, and it made him want to scream, but the alternative...

He tried to imagine kissing Mordecai on the mouth, tender, teasing, dragging him off to bed, but his animal wouldn't let him. It watched him warily, its bright red gaze driving the thoughts from his mind. Suddenly weary, Brick climbed into bed.

Mordecai hummed dreamily and wriggled against Brick's naked body. Brick brushed the man's hair aside and nuzzled behind his ear, marking him shiver.

"You up?" Brick asked, tickling the hairs on the back of Mordecai's neck, and ran a large hand down his tight stomach. True to his word, Mordecai wore nothing under the blankets, and Brick found him already hard. "Ha! Guess you are."

"Fuck," he breathed, arching automatically into Brick's grip. "It's been awhile."

"Don't gotta explain it to me," Brick said, grinding his own length between Mordecai's thighs. His friend pressed back against him and reached back to touch his side.

"You can fuck me, if you want," Mordecai said, so casually that he might have been remarking on the weather. Brick's gut cramped with an abrupt pang of lust.

"Uh... okay," he said lamely. He'd never got the hang of dirty talk.

Mordecai was much better at that. He moaned into the pillow as Brick screwed him, and sometimes looked over his shoulder, whimpering, ' _Más rapido,_ harder _, te necesito,_ Brick-' It made him crazy, brought him to the edge so quick that he had to think about something else for awhile.

He reached around Mordecai to stroke him, and knew his friend was close too when he said, through gritted teeth, " _Te deseo_ _,_ " Quietly, like a secret. He must have thought Brick would believe it to be more sex talk, like harder or faster, but Brick could tell that it meant something else...something almost romantic, definitely outside the rules. It pushed him over the edge, and he cried out against Mordecai's sweaty neck. The smaller man finished shortly after, with a only few more jerks, and swore as he came. Brick held his trembling body close while their heartbeats gradually slowed to normal.

"Thanks," Brick said, feeling like it was a dumb thing to say, but wanting to say something. It didn't matter. Mordecai had already fallen asleep.

In the darkness, Brick pulled away enough to hold up the key on his necklace, inspecting it by the moonlight. Now that he had a closer look, he was certain that the keys were the same, which meant that it must be Amanda's. It had to be. What were the chances that someone beside his missing sister had been here, on the exact same planet where her trail went cold, with the same key?

But where was she, then?

Sleep began to pull him down with inexorable fingers.

"Now I lay me down to sleep," he whispered, barely mouthing the words. "I pray the Lord my soul to keep."

He half-drowsed through the familiar ritual. He prayed every night, a habit forged in the fires of childhood. When he traveled with his friends, it had been a pain to lie awake and count the sets of snores, waiting for everyone to fall asleep so they wouldn't hear him. But he always prayed, every night for the thirty-eight years of his life, even when things got so bad that he felt like there must be no God, even when he'd done things so awful that he hoped there wasn't.

"Amen," he murmured, already slipping out on a tide of dreams.


	2. God-Given Right

Brick woke to a world of endless blue skies, standing in grass so uniformly green that it couldn't be on Pandora, couldn't even be real. Only dreams and paintings looked like this. Creatures cavorted in the meadow nearby, some familiar, some fantastic. A white, four-legged animal with a long neck, a spiny thing, a bear. They went about their own business, seemingly unaware of him. In the distance, a flock of starlings exploded into the air. The formation turned loops that made Brick dizzy to watch.

He looked away. When he saw the other thing, the thing in the water, he wanted to look back at those unsettling birds, but he was mesmerized.

A quivering biomass marred the landscape, as large as it was unspeakably awful. Its pink surface, ropey with veins, bruised toward purple and yellow in places. It was deformed by tumors just underneath the slick exterior, making it lumpy. The whole thing throbbed. At the same time, Brick knew that it was dead meat, the way you can know things in dreams without any proof. Human figures crawled all over it, swarming like ants, and their mouths worked on the organ, gnashing and gnawing. Brick recoiled.

"Stop," he heard himself say, although he was terrified that those figures would turn their attention on him. "Please, stop eating it."

His voice came out in a rasp, but some of the figures heard and stopped to look at him. Their eyes were the worst, because they were utterly human. They could have been the eyes of anyone Brick had ever met. Their bloody lips parted as they grinned, baring their pink-stained teeth and squinting their awful eyes.

"Come and eat. There's plenty for all. You just have to reach out and take it," they said together. Their voices could only be described as gentle.

"I don't wan' it." Brick said, weeping like a child. But suddenly he did want it, wanted to sink his teeth into the throbbing pink mass more than anything in the world. An unearthly whispering filled his ears with promises. It will taste like apple pie, the voices said. Like an expensive cigar, like pork, like sweaty flesh. It will fill you in ways that food never can, and you'll never be hungry again. You'll never be sad or scared or guilty. That was the promise that the whispering voices made, buzzing in his brain.

"I can't!"

"There goes Brick! Tall as a house and twice as thick! It's your God-given right, Brick. Take your pleasures where you can, because this is your kingdom, the kingdom of man...you better take your pleasures now, because you're going to the other place soon enough!" The figures laughed with their mouths full of meat. Globs fell out, and even those tempted him, and he cried harder, but his feet moved without consent. He waded into the water.

When he touched the pulsating biomass, he found it warm under his fingertips, and vibrating with life, sure, but somehow not alive. Because the living feed off the dead, and build homes on the graves. This was another thing that Brick knew without knowing. But, didn't he? Didn't he scrape out a life on Pandora, where the strongest built their homes over the bones of the dead?

 _I'm alive,_ Brick reasoned.  _I deserve this because I'm still alive, and I'm hungry._

He leaned forward and bit a piece out of the shivering thing, severing a chunk cleanly.

It turned to smoke in his mouth. Someone gasped, and he turned to see Amanda standing in the water behind him. He had last seen her when she was fifteen and he was twenty-five, but now she looked to be about ten years old. Her dark hair fell in loose waves across her eyes, and her fingers fluttered at her throat. She stared at Brick as though he were a monster. He tried to tell her it was alright, because he was alive, alive and hungry, but that didn't make sense to him anymore. The words flapped away like starlings as they left his mouth.

A thousand voices screamed behind him. He looked back to the biomass, but found it gone, replaced by a rakk hive. The enormous beast heaved on its side, stumpy legs kicking futility. It had been split open by the escaping rakks, and struggled in its dying throes. Its exposed innards glistened.

"Not dead, not the dead," the rakks seemed to cry as they spiraled upwards. Their bat-like wings made a whiskery sound. "The living build their homes over the bodies of the weak. But you are alive, and strong. Brick the brawler, Brick the strong, your momma says you came out wrong!"

Brick sunk to his knees and let the water come up to his chest, even though it had turned red from the rakk hive's blood. He lifted his hands to cover his ears, and saw that they were red too, the blood standing out brilliantly in the lines of his palms. His fingers trembled.

"Shut up!" he cried. Even though he clamped his bloody hands over his ears, he could hear them. The sound only grew muffled, became a maddening murmur that buzzed in his ears. Something brushed against his foot, something so cold that it seemed to freeze his skin. Brick shivered and-


	3. Coincidence

-woke up. Brick blinked in the darkness, groping around, finding his limbs hopelessly tangled with Mordecai's. The man's feet were freezing cold against his. It was those damned icy feet that had drawn Brick back into the real world, and he felt extremely grateful. He murmured his thanks against the back of Mordecai's neck.

The smaller man grumbled for him to knock it off. Brick smiled and drowsed again.

* * *

A sound like an egg cracking startled him from sleep. His hand flew up automatically to his necklace and found everything where it should be- his childhood dog's mummified paw, and the key, and... the other key.  _The stray girl,_ he remembered. Brick sat up in bed, blankets pooled in his lap, and looked around for the source of the noise.

It came again, and the windowpane shuddered. The slatted blinds trembled. For some reason Brick felt sure that it would be the girl out there, having tracked him down, now somehow banging on the second story apartment window. He crossed the room anyways, pulled the cord to retract the blinds, and flung open the window. Something small and hard sailed through the opening and hit him on the cheek.

"Fuck!" he cried in alarm, and touched the stinging welt.

He leaned out the window. Lilith stared up at him from the alleyway below. "Sorry! Did I hit you?" It was hard to tell in the blue, pre-dawn light, but Brick thought she was holding a rock.

"Good shot," he said.

Mordecai groaned from behind him. "Who the hell are you talking to?" he asked. His accent was thick in his sleep-slurred speech, and it made Brick want to climb back into bed.

"It's Lil," he said to Mordecai. To Lilith, he called down, "Whaddya want?"

"The scouting unit just got back. I mean, I think they did. Andy came to tell us. He was kind of... babbling."

"Shit. Okay, go on, we'll meet you."

She stared at him for a long moment, and Brick couldn't gauge her expression in the dark. He remembered that he was naked except for the necklace, and although Lilith could only see his bare chest, she must have wondered why he was in Mordecai's house before the sun was even up. He groaned internally.

"What you waitin' for? I told you we'd be down," he snapped, and hoped that she wouldn't ask about it later. Excuses were never his area of expertise. He preferred to punch anyone who made him uncomfortable.

She took the hint. "Right, going. See you soon," she said, and waved at him as she jogged around the corner. Brick sighed and closed the window.

Mordecai jumped up. "Wait a minute! What time is it?  _Caquita_! Don't stand there with your pecker hanging out, get dressed!"

Brick staggered around obediently, looking for his clothes. Diluted light fell through the window, barely illuminating the floor, and he guessed that it was only about five in the morning. He stepped over discarded booze bottles and stray gun pieces. Mordecai liked to take apart old guns when he drank, apparently with the goal of recombining them, but usually got bored before the construction. Brick turned his ankle on a sniper barrel and swore.

"What's taking you so long?" Mordecai asked. He stood impatiently with his hands on his hips, fully clothed.

"I can't find... oh," Brick said, and spotted his tank-top lying half under the bed. By the time he realized his mistake, he'd already squeezed it on. The shirt actually belonged to Mordecai, so its smaller armholes pinched Brick's biceps, and the hem barely came down to his belly button.

Mordecai looked him over, and grinned. "Lookin' good,  _Mamacita_."

Brick grabbed a dirty towel off the ground and wrapped it around his waist like a skirt. He stuck out a hip, fluttered his eyelashes, and said in a wavering falsetto, "You never take me anyplace nice, Mordy. Does my body embarrass you?" He bounced his pecs. Mordecai burst into peals of laughter.

"Nah, baby, your figure is tight," he said, when he could breath again.

Brick dropped the towel and reached up to yank the shirt over his head, which turned out to be tricky. It caught on his ears, then around his arms, and he wriggled to extract himself. The shirt ripped all the way up one side as he tugged it free.

"Shit. Sorry." Brick said. He noticed how Mordecai looked away quickly, and the flush that had crept across his cheeks. Brick chuckled.

"Enjoy the show?" he teased.

Mordecai rolled his eyes, turning a deeper shade of red.  _"_ Don't be an idiot. Come on, Blood." The bird, who had been watching them with exasperation twinkling in her beady eyes, flapped over to perch on her master's forearm. Her long talons sunk into his leather glove, and Brick shuddered as he thought about some of the times he'd been on the receiving end of those daggers.

"Go ahead, Mordy. I gotta stop for my stuff," he said. Mordecai hesitated, and nodded before he left, slamming the front door behind him. Suddenly Brick remembered that he'd left his clothes in the bathroom the night before. He smacked his forehead with his bandaged palm.

In the bathroom, he quickly stepped into his cold, stiff pants, hitched them up, and buckled his belt. His sleeveless shirt felt freezing against his skin. Lastly he walked into his boots and palmed his fistful of rings, cramming them on as he hurried outside.

He ducked into his own apartment to grab his guns and shield, since it sounded like there might be trouble. The small living room stank of beer and stale grease. Brick paused to admire one of the pictures stapled to the wall, and whistled appreciatively, like someone leering at a dirty photo. But this was a picture of a gun- a glossy, full-size spread of the new Torgue Carnage- torn out of a catalog. Brick forgot that he put it up. He could have admired it forever, but instead he snatched his Cationic shield and snapped it to his belt.

He depressed the button with his thumb and felt the energy field crackle over his skin. Combat felt most natural to Brick when nothing stood between himself and an enemy, flesh on flesh, so he could feel the crunch of bones under his fists. But for armed skirmishes, he had to admit that an energy shield was useful. Before leaving, he holstered his favorite pistol and slung a shotgun across his back- the maximum amount of guns he could carry, without his SDU expanded bandoleer, and he didn't expect  _that_ much trouble.

The sun was just clearing the horizon as Brick took the stairs, two at a time, and rounded the corner. New Haven's gates came into view. The Raiders already flocked around, blocking his view, but Brick didn't see anyone from the scouting unit.

The Raider who went to get Lilith, a young man named Andy, stood apart and stopped any civilians who wandered up. His freckled face was pale. "Brick," he said, when he saw the large man strolling up. "Where were you?"

Brick opened his mouth to reply, but Andy kept talking. "Oh God, oh God, it's Peterson, sir, Peterson came back, but he... he..." The boy looked like he might throw up. Brick put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

"Cool out, kid. What's goin' on? Keep it short." He noticed that Andy was shivering. Brick liked the boy well enough, but he was absolutely useless when the shit hit the fan.

Six months ago, when Brick and Mordecai were knee deep in driving the corrupt Atlas Lance army out of the Dusty Fathoms, they had found Lance Private Andy cowering behind a stack of munitions chests. He cried for his mommy when he saw them coming. Mordecai had kicked him in the ribs, and told him to get the hell up so he could loot the containers, and later they'd allowed the teary-eyed Private to tag along back to T-Bone Junction. After the remaining Lance troops were dissolved, he'd followed them back to New Haven, and somehow been allowed to join the Crimson Raiders.

"Excuse me," Andy squeaked, and rushed over to stop a sunburned man and his wife from approaching the ring of Raiders. "Ma'am, sir, wait a moment. You can't go over there-"

Brick stopped listening and went to check out the situation for himself. The other Raiders muttered to each other in grim tones that made Brick's arm hairs prickle. He elbowed through the small crowd.

The Raiders were a force that Roland had put together to protect New Haven from the ruthless Hyperion corporation, hungry wildlife, and bandit raids. There weren't many in their ranks, maybe twenty in all, and most of them seemed to be here... All except the scouting unit. When Brick saw Peterson, he had a pretty good idea of what might have happened to them.

Peterson knelt on the ground, Lilith on one side of him, Roland on the other, and Brick knew immediately that the man was going to die. A trail of blood spanned from the truck outside the gates to where the injured guard now knelt. He held his coat closed with a white-knuckled grip, apparently to keep in whatever mess lay beneath.

"I sent Private Gilley to get Zed," Lilith said, her voice wavering. "He'll fix you up."

Peterson smiled, but his eyes were unfocused. "Don't worry about me, Mom," he said. For once Lilith didn't argue about the nickname. The Raiders affectionately called her Mom and Roland Dad, which she'd never liked- she thought it made her sound like an old lady. Roland had been flattered by the nickname. Now he squeezed Peterson's free hand.

"What happened? Did anyone follow you?" Roland asked.

"I don't... think so. I came a long way. I didn't think I was gonna make it. The Crimson Enclave... Hyperion took it over. A commander caught us... a woman... she-" he broke into a coughing fit, and a glut of blood bubbled from his mouth. Lilith wiped his chin.

"Shhh," she said, but Roland shook his head. They looked at each other, and a whole conversation passed wordlessly between them. Lilith glanced away.

"Did you recognize her?" Roland asked, his voice still kind, but more urgent now, as the light faded in Peterson's eyes.

"No... she called us bandits. She... she slaughtered everyone... I'm sorry." he closed his eyes, and it seemed like he was done talking, but then he continued, because he was still a damn good scout. "Someone called her... the Lawbringer."

Brick's heart jumped into his throat, and the world lost color. He was dimly aware of Mordecai turning to him, eyes wide. In his mind, the animal paced, its mottled hide flashing between himself and the image of his baby sister, a plastic toy pistol on each slack hand, watching her favorite movie for the millionth time. She caught Brick staring at her. Grinning, she raised a pistol to shoot him with.  _Blam. Don't mess with the Lawbringer, baby._

Brick blinked and shook his head. Mordecai looked a question at him, but Brick turned away, not ready to think about it, not with the Raider dying at their feet. He faded fast now. His chest fluttered in shallow gasps, and the pale hand fell away, revealing his blood drenched shirt beneath his jacket.

Doctor Zed shoved Brick aside, went into the group, and knelt before the injured man. Brick stepped back to give him space to work. He couldn't see exactly what the doctor did, but saw him look up at Lilith after awhile, and shake his head.

"Damn," she said, voice raw. Peterson wasn't the first Raider they'd lost, but that didn't make it easy. Roland covered his face with both hands, just for a second, and when he took them away, his expression had become businesslike. He stood up.

"We need to made sure he wasn't tracked here. Brick, Mordecai, follow his trail. Everyone else come with me, so we can put together a squadron to investigate the Hyperion situation in the Enclave. We've gotta deal with this right away."

Lilith remained in her knees in the dirt, head down, taking the loss of Peterson hard.  _But it wasn't just Peterson,_ Brick remembered.  _The whole scouting unit..._  He fingered the key around his neck, and tried hard not to think about ancient Earth westerns- of their manic, jubilant violence, and how raptly his little sister watched them. How her eyes sparkled.

Brick realized that he'd glazed over again, and snapped back to reality as Mordecai touched his arm.

"Come on, let's go," Mordecai said. He might have looked concerned, but Brick wouldn't know it, because his eyes were hidden behind the dark lenses of his goggles. Mordecai knew about the movies, and about Amanda's favorite, The Lawbringer. That had been one of the few things Brick told him about his childhood. It had been a wholly good memory, almost resplendent in its perfection. Now the thought turned his stomach.

 _Just a coincidence,_  he told himself, even as his animal flashed its teeth.


	4. Animal

They'd lost Peterson's trail. Now they scoured the area for any sign of Hyperion; or Brick did, anyway, squeezing the wheel and scanning the horizon. Mordecai reclined in the seat with his hands folded behind his head, dozing. Bloodwing nestled against his cheek.

The sun was barely up, but already sweat soaked Brick's shirt and ran down his neck. His bare palm made a sucking sound as he squeezed the wheel. The other remained in bandages, and his skin felt unpleasantly moist under the wrap. He tugged the bandage lose with his teeth and let it be whipped away by the wind.

The truck dipped as they rolled over a Spiderant mound. Soft dirt collapsed under their treads with a soft shushing sound, and some of the armored insects scrabbled up to the surface behind them. The truck outran them easily, bumping over dunes and crushing patches of weedy grass. Jagged screes broke up the wasteland. Wind turbines and power lines cut start silhouettes against the clear blue sky. Smoke bellowed from a distant chimney.

"It might not be her," Mordecai said suddenly, startling Brick. Behind the goggles, his eyes might have been open the whole time.

"Huh?" Brick asked, as if he didn't know exactly what the other man meant.

"Amanda."

Brick swallowed. "It is, though. It's her."

"You can't know that. Anyway, is that a good thing? She killed the entire scouting unit."

"Peterson said she called them bandits. She prob'ly thought they were gonna raid the compound," Brick argued.

"Maybe," Mordecai said, sitting up straighter. "But-"

"Why do you care?"

Mordecai fell silent for a moment. "I don't want you to be disappointed."

"That ain't all, is it?" Brick snapped, his hands twisting even tighter around the wheel. "You... you think -"

"It's not like that," Mordecai interrupted.

"You think I'll take her side. That I'll do what she tells me to, 'cos she's my sister. But I'm not an idiot, Mordy. I'm not an animal." But he did have one, and now it narrowed its eyes.

"I know you're not! And the Hyperion commander...that's not even her. Loads of little girls saw that movie, you know. It wasn't just Amanda who wanted to be the Lawbringer."

"I know it's her," Brick insisted.

"So what if she is, and she tries to kill us anyway? You want to make the call? You want to pull the trigger?"

In Brick's mind, his animal reared up, and he slammed on the breaks. Mordecai threw his hands up just in time to keep from his head slamming against the dash. "Shut your damn mouth!" Brick roared over the squealing tires as they skidded to a stop. "Mind your own business!"

Mordecai let loose a string of Spanish curses and pounded his fist on the console. "You idiot! I'm trying to protect you."

But Brick was already protected. He had his animal, and now it snapped and snarled, lunging for release, but he yanked it back. Not Mordecai. Never Mordecai. Brick clutched his head in his hands.

"Shut up!" he moaned. He vaulted over the side of the vehicle and began to stamp off.

"Where are you going?" Mordecai called after him.

"I'll find a catch-a-ride. Fuck off," Brick snapped, not turning around. Mordecai said nothing, but Brick heard the suspension creak as he changed seats, and felt the hot wind on his back as the truck sped off.

Brick wiped his eyes, and his wrist came away wet. He didn't remember crying. His memory always went cloudy when his animal got riled up, or got to pokin', as his momma would have said. But, that wasn't right. She would have called it the devil.

 _When the devil gets to pokin',_ Brick remembered, and shivered despite the heat. With Mordecai gone, his animal--or devil--sat back on its haunches. He sighed and ambled into the shade of some bluffs, and walked along in their shadow, eyes peeled for a Catch-a-Ride digistruct module.

The day was silent and hot, and the strip of shade grew narrower as the sun climbed higher into the sky. Brick guessed that Mordecai would come back for him if it got to be too late- they'd fought and stormed off a thousand times before, it seemed like, and they'd always made up.

That was his last thought before he hit the ground face first. The air woofed from his lungs. A heavy weight pressed him down and something sharp twisted into his back. His energy shield crackled under the impact, and hot, rancid breath blew down his neck.

With all his strength, Brick braced himself against the ground and pushed. The weight lifted. He was just able to flip around before a massive paw slammed back down on his chest. His shield flared to life again, sounding its low-charge alert, a staccato  _beep, beep, beep_.

A massive skag loomed over him, bright orange against the shadowy cliffs. Flames licked over its armor. A pillar of blue smoke poured from its muzzle, and Brick could see the ball of hellfire brewing just behind its white hot, razor sharp teeth.

He kicked straight up and put a combat boot into the creature's gut. It reared up, and Brick rolled out of the way while it recovered. He staggered to his feet. His shotgun lay in the dirt, twisted and mangled.

The skag's head snapped up, jaws spread wide and dripping.

Brick tried to lurch out of the way, but too late; A whirlwind of flames engulfed him. His shield held, barely, but he could feel the heat through the membrane of energy. Just as the flames died, so did his shield. It uttered a final bleat before dissipating in a shower of sparks. His arms blistered where embers kissed them.

Gritting his teeth, Brick reached for his revolver--a Jacobs Masher, his two shot canon--and it slid easily from its worn holster. He brought it up between himself and the enraged skag. Its barrel flashed in the sunlight as he pulled the trigger. The bullet punched a hole the size of a baby's fist in the skag's lowermost jaw, and a second round followed the first, staggering the skag with the impact.

But already the beast was whirling back to face Brick, eyes glittering with hate. He fumbled to reload the gun. The beast's jaw had been half severed by the shots, and it swung sickeningly from a wad of sinew.  _Shit, shit, shit_ , Brick thought, and snapped the chamber shut, only to have the revolver swatted out of his grip by a huge paw an instant after.

He stumbled back, hand shredded fresh by the skag's claws. Before he could lunge for his revolver, the fire-skag struck again, this time gashing his chest and snagging his necklace on one claw. It broke with an audible snap, the trinkets sent flying.

Brick's animal uncoiled.

"Come and get me, you fuck ugly piece of shit," Brick taunted. The animal's ugly, throaty chortle warped his voice.

He danced around the skag's powerful swipes, suddenly full of electricity. A step at a time, he led the fire skag back around to where the pendants fell. The thinking part of his brain, the Brick part, begged him to grab the revolver. But the animal had nearly taken control of him now, and it didn't need a gun.

The skag stopped. Its muzzle opened, but its throat was dark. It inhaled--once, twice, trying to kindle a flame--while Brick's fingers combed through the dust, seeking his necklace. He felt a metal edge and plucked a key out of the sand. With his focus on the ground, he didn't notice the skag lower its head. A moment later, the beast slammed him up against the cliff.

He dropped the key. His lips began to form a word, ' _N_ _o',_ before his animal took overtook him. It filled his vision, red and mottled and side-winding. It blocked out everything. The skag, the sun, the grit in his mouth, the pain in his hand, the twinkle of the key disappearing in the dirt, they all fell away as Brick became his animal.

A black, humorless laugh burbled out of him. The skag reared up and came down hard, and Brick threw his right arm to block the blow which had been meant to gore him. Claws sank deep into the muscle of his bicep. It should have been agonizing, but Brick's animal felt no pain. It was a reptilian thing with no nerves or blood- only teeth. His left hand shot up and grabbed the skag's hanging mandible, and wrenched it free with a unnervingly quiet pop.

Blood flowed from its muzzle. It tried to back away, but Brick caught it by another of its jaws and yanked it back with all his might. He smashed the skag's face against the rocks, skinning his own knuckles. The skag twisted and made a keening sound, which made Brick laugh. It broke away and took a shambling step backward, but Brick followed it, swaying from side to side, a grin plastered to his face.

"Here, puppy," he crooned. "Here, puppy, puppy." He launched himself at the animal and closed each fist around each of its two remaining jaws. He yanked hard in opposite directions. The skag's face made a wet tearing sound as it split apart. That was impossible, of course, but somehow he'd done it.

He forced the writhing creature down to the ground and stomped its mouth, pinning it, and butterflied its face. He felt the life rush out when his foot smashed through its skull.  _Impossible, impossible._ He wouldn't remember it later. Not the details, anyway. His animal had its own mind. With the fire skag's corpse cooling in the dirt, Brick became aware of another sound. His head snapped up.

Only a few yards away crouched another skag, this one a pup. Its whining had attracted Brick's attention. Looking into its beady red eyes, he had the strangest feeling that the pup could see his animal, could sense its control over his body and had locked gazes with it. For a moment he meant to jump up and overtake the tiny animal. He could practically hear its anguished cries, and then-

Brick's animal laid down. The man stood alone, freezing in the hot desert afternoon, right arm dead by his side. The skag pup blinked once at him, slowly. He slid to his knees. The world buckled and darkened around him. Dimly, he realized that he'd lost a lot of blood. He needed to get to...

But there was nowhere to go. His last thought before the darkness engulfed him was of his necklace, still lost and lying broken in the dirt.


	5. Wake Up, Jacob

Brick's nose and mouth filled with smoke, and he coughed. A maddening murmur resolved itself into two voices.

"He's waking up! Do you have to smoke that thing right in his face?" said a familiar sounding voice.

"Don't nag me, son," said the other. This one Brick didn't know. It was also a man's voice, and he spoke in a clipped drawl. "He can take it. He's a big boy!" 'Take it' ran together in a rush, sounding a little like 'tekkit'. The voice laughed, and it reminded Brick of his grandpap's- big, whooping, and smelling of tobacco.

"Brick? You awake?" Brick finally recognized the first voice as Mordecai's, and his heart raced.  _Am I awake?_  He wondered. He tried to open his eyes.

Two faces loomed directly over him. Mordecai's goggles made him look like an insect in Brick's bleary vision. The other man bristled with a wild, white beard. He peered down at Brick with milky eyes.

"Wake up, Jacob, day's a'breakin-" the older man said, the first part of a rhyme Brick half remembered. "Heheheh. So I hear you're not one of them bastards. Them cocksuckers who's fixing to block out the moon."  _Mewn._ Like mewl. All the consonants hard-edged, but somehow rife with good humor.

"Who..." Brick's voice cracked, and he coughed again.

"You cracked a few ribs," Mordecai explained. He said you as though Brick had done it to himself. That wasn't right. He remembered a fire skag, the biggest bitch he'd ever seen. He thought he could even still hear it chuffing.

A thought filled him with a bright burst of panic. The snap- The silver flash as his totems flew through the air. Brick's hand leaped to his throat and he found his necklace, or some necklace, anyway. The chain felt different. Everything else was where it should be, both keys and the paw. Brick nearly wept with relief.

"M' stuff," he croaked.

"I saw it was gone, so I went back to get it. Took a Goddamn hour. I thought Pris's paw was gone for sure," Mordecai said, pride in his voice.

Brick felt himself backsliding into unconsciousness. "Swear jar," he mumbled nonsensically, before sinking into the darkness. Somewhere far away, he heard his friend laugh.


	6. Eden

The words crawled over the page like drunk ants. Brick closed his eyes.

"Sound it out, baby," his momma said. Still patient, but with an edge flashing under the placid surface of her voice.

"I can't," Brick said.

He was only six years old and didn't know how to explain. Like his daddy, he wasn't good with words.

Brick and his momma sat around the kitchen table, his daddy having long since ambled upstairs to bed. He had to sleep early to be rested for the predawn chores. Brick looked longingly through the arch into the living room at the family's new television. It was a big old tube TV, hunched like a gray gargoyle on the carpet, a tape player and its tangle of wires sitting beside it. His aunt had dropped it off earlier that day, along with a cardboard box stacked full of old VHS tapes. Brick could see that treasure trove from where he sat.

His momma followed his gaze. "Forget about that damn dummy box. Betty only dumped it on us because her family's got the new one and she feels sorry for us," she said, spitting the word 'sorry' like a curse, and saying 'damn', an actual curse.

"Why's she sorry?" Brick asked, thumbing the pages of the book he was meant to be studying.

"Because she's a fool, that's why. She thinks we need that junk to be happy. But we don't. We've got God's love."

Brick nodded. "God is great. But I like TV, too."

His momma clocked him in the back of his head so fast that he had no time to react. His forehead smacked the table, stars briefly spangled his vision. From what sounded like a long way off, he heard a laugh, soft and melodic.

His vision cleared. As the stars fled, he saw his momma giggling behind an open book. "Sorry," she said. "Devil nipped me."

Brick giggled too.

His momma laid a hand over his. "Focus, baby."

He looked back down at the book. Squinting at the first line, he tried. "Wh- Wh..." The 'w' sound and the silent 'h', he remembered that, but before he could get to the rest of the word, it slipped across the page. "Damn!"

His momma's fist slammed on the table, jolting it so Brick's water glass leaned up precariously on its edge, and his hand shot out to grab it. His fingers bumped and nearly toppled it, but he caught it in time. His heart pounded. The books were on the table. If his momma loved anything more than God, it was books.

"Swear jar," she demanded, seeming not to have noticed the near catastrophe.

"I'm broke," Brick said.

"Liar."

"I really am, momma. I swear."

"I know. You just did," she said. A smile twitched around the corners of her wan mouth, and she forced it away.

Brick returned it double- a wide, gaptoothed grin- and his heart filled to bursting with love for his momma, who could be so serious and silly in turns. Tight turns, sometimes. Ones that made his head whip around if he didn't watch her close.

He watched now as her eyes narrowed, so he bowed his head, looking back at the book.

Magically, he picked up the second half of the word before it had time to skitter off. "What!" he cried, triumphant. He jabbed the single syllable with his index finger as though he could pin it down.

His momma blew out a long suffering sigh. "One word. It's a start. What am I going to do with you, my little Brick? Big as a house, twice as thick."

She'd made up the nickname and the accompanying rhyme awhile ago. At that time, Brick had liked it. He liked it better than his real name. Maurice had always felt like a name for an old man or a mouse.

To the pack of boys he ran with, he'd repeated the nickname and the rhyme as explanation. "Cos' I'm big!" he'd exclaimed. The biggest kid in the pack. But they'd laughed, and not the same as him and his momma, not with love. "And dumb," they'd said. He hadn't understood that part and suddenly did, but by then it was too late. It stuck. 

But he brandished the name like a shield. It was no mouse's name, or a feeble old man's. It was a strong, stout syllable, and his momma had given it to him, and he liked it. He was Brick. Brick the strong.

"I'm tryin," he said to his momma, eyes glued to the book. The little points on the letters seemed to curl in on themselves like the legs of a dead spider. "Can we watch a movie after?"

"After what, Brick? After I get tired of your blubbering?" she snapped, the edge breaking the surface at last, slicing him.

He felt embarrassed. His cheeks burned. "The words are too little."

"Fine, then we're done. Go to your room."

"I thought... daddy said I could watch a movie tonight. He said I could watch the one about the big shark," Brick said. He could hear the whine in his voice but felt helpless to stop himself. "You said it was okay. You-"

"Go to your room, Brick, Goddammit. Get out of my sight," his momma said.

Brick sprung up so fast that his knee knocked against the edge of the table. The impact tipped the glass again, and this time it did fall. It clumped against the table and dumped water across the wood.

"Swear jar," he cried. "Put a penny in the jar!" Through his tears, he saw her surge forward. He flinched away, but she wasn't angled toward him. She was after her books. She snatched them out of the way before the water could reach them, ignoring Brick's outburst, at least for now.

He wasn't going to stand there and wait her attention to turn. From experience, he knew that her eyes would have become steely, her voice stern. Her wedding ring would be sharp on her white knuckled fist. So he wouldn't wait.

Brick turned and slammed out through the back door, the screen smacking shut behind him.

The night air felt blessedly cool against his flushed skin. He didn't linger long on the porch but sprinted across the dirt around the house and plunged, barefoot, into the back field. Stalks of wheat tickled his arms as he went.

Millions of stars crowded out the void. A glassy moon bulged out of the darkness, unfamiliar in the Menoetius sky- too large, too close, seeming to watch Brick with cool regard. But even with the alien moon overhead, Brick began to feel calmer. Whisking through the wheat, the world perfectly still around him, he might have been bounding through space.

He pictured himself on some distant moon, the only person for lightyears around. His feet carried him into a copse of trees, under bows of branches that he imagined to be moonrock arches, past damp thicks of lichen and slick stones.

He reached the lake. Brick had been to the lake before, traipsing after the pack of kids he called his friends. He'd stripped down to his skivvies to swing from a tire and splashed, screaming, from whichever child was designated 'Jaws' at the moment. In the daytime, it had been fun; the most fun Brick could remember having. It was probably why he wound up there.

Nighttime transformed the lake. It had become self-important, ripe with reverent silence. The reflections of stars in the water looked to Brick like the flash of submerged coins. A breeze ruffled the surface, scattering the pinpricks of light. As he stood transfixed, a choir of frogs began their nightly rehearsal-  _Cree, cree, cree._

Something stirred, catching his eye. It was a bird whuffling its wings. A crow watched Brick in the darkness, feathers pricked, beak parted. It had been eating when he surprised it.

"It's okay," he crooned, stepping closer. It didn't fly away, even when Brick got nearly close enough to touch it.

It perched on something spongy, its claws sunk in deep, that he could barely see in the starlight. Without warning, the shape resolved into a body. Malformed, bloated and twisted almost beyond recognition, but Brick knew at once that it was human. He froze.

The crow picked that moment to shriek at him, sending him staggering back. He tripped over something in the dark and fell into the muddy water.

He scrambled up, eyes fixed on the corpse. Its buggy eyes had rolled back, revealing the whites. Something bulged through its lips. Brick realized that it was the its tongue, black and decayed, and the crow bent to pluck at it as though it had read his mind. The flesh gave a moment of resistance before it ripped free and slipped down the bird's throat.

Something moved in Brick. For a moment he saw the world around him still- the lake, the crow, the body, and the bulbous moon over the tops of trees- but felt removed from it. The thing in him roiled, a great heaving flank that couldn't fit, and surged up, up, for the first time, up. His animal took control.

* * *

Brick woke in a field, grown back to adulthood. That unfamilar moon hung overhead, its curve as pale and round as a frog's belly.

He stood in a painting from his childhood, the one his momma had bought just after he found the corpse in the lake. She'd called 'the Garden of Earthy Delights', and Brick had hated it from the first, was terrified of it, and it had haunted the rest of his childhood.

And now, it had been made real. He recognized his surroundings as the first panel of that nightmarish triptych...in Eden.

Starlings swooped over distant fields. They turned and swept in perfect formation, as though they were a single creature instead of many feathery bodies. Watching that living tide made Brick dizzy. He turned away from them. Where he looked, he found the lake. Too perfect to be real, blue as the sky and glassy-smooth.

A spire thrust from the water. It towered over Brick, monstrously tall, almost spearing the moon's belly with its tip. The structure was coral colored and webbed with veins, like marble or a translucent fish, spiny in some spots and smooth in others. Water sprung from it, narrow streams like it was pissing. An owl napped in its core. Although Brick had seen the thing a thousand times or more, it still raised the short hairs on the nape of his neck.

His eyes followed the tower down to where it met the water, and there his gaze stuck. Whatever the painter had intended under the surface of that pristine, crystalline water, Brick didn't know. All he knew was how he'd seen it the day his momma brought the thing home, the very morning after he'd been to the lake.

Bodies. A whole mess of them: a sloppy slew of blackish, bluish, rotting meat. Birds stepped across the swollen corpses, prying loose pieces with their beaks and tossing them back into their gullets. Brick looked away.

He hadn't looked away the first time. That time, he'd been mesmerized, transfixed by terror. That time, he'd pissed his pants.

His gaze settled on the moon. It didn't belong in this secret place, the innermost curve of his mind. He wanted to swat it out of the sky. He reached out, and the dark Vs of starlings slid aside, but he lost his footing before he could touch it. He fell.

* * *

A boy groped around in the the water. When he stood up, he held a small frog. Its pale throat wobbled. It wriggled in the boy's grasp, but he gripped each of its front legs between thumb and forefinger. He held it out, showing it to the girls, and when he was sure they were watching, he tore the frog in half. It pulled apart noiselessly, its guts plopping into the muck.

"Eeeeeee!" cried one of the girls as she buried her face in her friend's shoulder.

"That's nasty!" said the other.

The boys laughed ( _laughed like drains_ , Brick's daddy would say) and elbowed each other with mean-spirited glee.

But not Brick.

He stood apart, fists clenched at his sides, face red and scrunched. The other boys were on the cusp of adolescence, older than him by a few years. He was eight. At the moment, those years felt like decades. They made him smaller and weaker.

"Don't do that!" he yelled.

"Do what? This?" asked a different boy. He raised another frog.

Brick rushed forward. Before he could reach him, the boy crushed the frog in his fist. Brick was close enough to see its eyes pop.

"Stop!" he screamed. He sounded shrill to his own ears.

"What're you gonna do, Brick? Brick the thick?"

"Big as a house and twice as thick!" added another.

Brick wished he were as big as a house. It might have been true among kids his own age, but these were teenagers.

Their cruelty rarely surprised him, and yet, this did. This thing with the frogs. He'd never seen anyone wring the life out of a creature with their bare hands. He wondered if they'd felt a tickle when the frog's souls slipped between their fingers. But when he looked at the boys' twisty, toothy grins, he knew they hadn't.

One of them fished around in the water, angling for another frog. Brick launched himself at the boy but was shoved away easily. He staggered backward and splashed into the shallow water, landing squarely on his ass. His cheeks burned. The boys bellowed.

"Brick the brawler, Brick the strong," they sing-songed. "Your momma says you came out wrong!"

Brick thought they probably didn't understand the words, only copied them from kids his own age who'd made up this second verse, guessing it would hurt him, which it did. But they didn't know about his animal. It didn't like the rhymes either, and now it blinked, stirred from its slumber.

 _Shhh, baby, shhh,_  he cautioned it, just like his momma said to him when he started to get worked up. Don't let your devil take hold, she would say. Don't let it own you.

"Come on, pussy, if you wanna stop us," a boy taunted. "You know what I heard? I heard you're sick."

Brick tried to stand up, but the boy planted a foot in his chest and sent him sprawling back into the water.

"Brick the homo, Brick the sick. Ask him nice, he'll suck your dick," the bully sneered.

Brick's animal didn't like that. That was one of the bad things, the things he shouldn't think about. It chortled with Brick's mouth, an inhuman sound.

It made the other boy step back. Brick climbed to his feet, grinning like a shark, his consciousness loosening.  _Shhh, baby,_  he thought, but it was too late.

He slipped.

* * *

Brick's animal departed with a flick of its tail. He blinked awake.

Frogs blatted from the reeds. The lake was so full of the tiny amphibians that Brick could reach out and pick one up if he tried. They perched on every patch of earth, every rotted stump. Their white throats flickered as they sung.

Brick found himself kneeling in the shallow water, hands folded in his lap. The other boys were gone. Sometime while he was out, the sun had set over the tops of the trees, so only a few golden bangles of light fell across the water.

After a bit, a frog hopped onto his thigh. It blinked sleepily. Brick reached out to stroke the creature's slimy head, but when his hand moved into one of the patches of light, he froze.

He saw his hand in the sunshine. He saw the blood. It had dried in spatters across his knuckles, and he turned it over, noticing how the blood had settled in the folds of his palm like a web of veins.

Brick tried to remember what happened after the boys teased him, but the memory was gone, dragged into the depths by his animal.

* * *

He opened his eyes in the painting.

The pit yawned before him- the sinkhole somewhere south of the lake, full of black water and shadowy shapes moving just under the surface. Brick had always looked at that conspicuous pit as a kid and thought it looked out of place. He thought it might connect underground with the third panel, with Hell, in a long, subterranean slip.

Frogs leaped around the pit, almost as many as there were that afternoon when he'd lost control. Birds strutted back and forth. They plucked up the frogs and picked them apart, eating their entrails. Birds were born to eat frogs, so Brick couldn't hate them for that. Still.

A panicked cry split the silence.

"Huh...?" Brick said, looking around.

"I can't h-hold on-" the voice said. "I can't..."

Brick's feet carried him to the pit. He peered in and found the source of the cries. It was Andy, the Raider he and Mordecai had rescued- if you could call it that- in the Fathoms, now requiring rescue again. The young man dangled over the water, fingers dug into the muddy sides of the sinkhole, his face a map of terror.

Brick crouched and grabbed Andy's wrist. His feet slipped against the slick grass around the hole, and for a sickening moment he thought he would slide in. He gripped the weeds with his other hand.

"Let go," he said to Andy. "I gotcha."

"You're not strong enough," the raider cried. Tears rolled down his pasty, mud streaked cheeks, and although Brick had been half aware that he was dreaming, he was suddenly unsure. Things had never looked so clear in a dream before.

"Look at me, kid. I'm plenty strong," Brick said. He tried to haul Andy up, but the man didn't budge. Something was wrong. His arms, which had just been thick as pylons, had become the lax, freckled limbs of a boy. He felt himself slipping but held tight to Andy's wrist.

He looked around frantically. A trio of figures that Brick recognized as God and his creations, Adam and Eve, stood a few yards away, half hidden by shadows. They returned his gaze cooly, as flawless and dispassionate as figures carved from soap.

"Help," Brick called. "He's gonna fall!"

But they only watched, their eyes like hooded half moons.

* * *

Brick wept in the shade of the porch, knees pulled up to his chest. Nearby, birds wickered sweetly. The backdoor creaked open. He wiped his nose on his wrists, streaking them with snot. While the door was open, he could faintly hear the furious stranger in the living room, still hollering. Brick didn't catch much but heard the man yell something about 'that simple boy'.

He buried his head in his arms.

"Baby."

His momma knelt in the dirt before him. He looked up. Her cornflower blue eyes, same as his, were full of surprising compassion. Brick was surprised. He'd expected that other momma- her devil.

"Did you hit that man's son?" she asked.

"I- I don't know. The thing... the animal..."

"The devil," she said. "The devil made you do it. I understand, baby. You can't help it."

Yes, he thought, that was right. He couldn't help it. For a moment he could have exploded with gratitude, might have leaped up and hugged her around the neck the way he only ever did with his daddy. But she continued.

"You were born wrong. It was my fault, because your daddy and I made you before the wedding, and the devil is exacting. He got his hooks in you from the start. So you need to be careful that you don't let him walk, baby. Don't let him get to pokin'."

"I will," Brick said, although he wouldn't. Animal or devil, it protected him, and he needed protection. From the boys. From his momma. From the things he couldn't think about.

"The devil made you dumb, Brick. He made you mean."

"Mean like you?"

The warmth fled her eyes. "What did you say?" she asked.

Brick couldn't reply. He stared back at her, dumbstruck by his own audacity. She didn't wait for his answer. She stood and hauled him up by his ear, twisting it until he cried out.

"You watch your Goddamn everlasting mouth."

She gripped his arm so hard that her fingers left pale indents in his skin and marched him out to the old field. He wondered where she could be taking him. As far as he knew, there was nothing there but rusted out farm equipment and weeds. He struggled weakly but didn't really try to get free. Part of him, the child that still loved his momma, trusted her. Besides, she was stronger.

When he saw the old cellar door through the grass, the scabby wood and fresh padlock, he really did try to squirm away, his momma held him fast. He'd forgotten about the cellar. Brick had seen it only once. He'd been much younger then, and it had scared the hell out of him.

"If you act like an animal, I'll pen you like an animal," his momma said.

"No, momma, I won't. I swear-"

But she had already wrenched the door open with one hand. She shoved Brick through with the other it shut behind him.

Darkness clenched around him like a fist. He heard the lock click outside. Age had not made him braver. If anything, terror needled him even more sharply, because now he'd seen the painting. He'd seen the pit at God's feet and shapes succumbing to the long slip. He whirled around to pound on the door, but his feet slid on the mildewy steps and out from under him. His knee hit the stone step with a crack. He rolled down and down, into the cellar.

Brick huddled at the base of the stairs, too scared to climb back to the locked door, even more scared of the blackness beyond. The old earth smelled bad- a sour guts smell- and he heard bats rustling in the beams. Worse, he couldn't shake the surety that if he stepped deeper into the cellar, he would emerge somewhere else. Into the Other Place, into Hell, where he would roil out on the surf with the damned souls.

He shivered, wept, prayed. Time passed. His animal relieved him in shifts.

Brick was convinced he could hear the bird king wickering in the darkness, preparing to swallow him whole.


	7. Bool

Brick's dream slunk away as soon as he woke. He stared at the mildew streaked ceiling, noticing how the quality of light in the room had changed, become warmer and more flickery. Flames had replaced sunlight. He took stock of himself.

He felt like someone had stuffed him with lead pellets. His limbs weighed a ton, and his lungs filled with broken glass agony when he tried to breathe deep. The pain nearly made him black out again.  _The broken ribs._ They had used Doctor Zed's miracle elixir on him, Brick could tell that much from the way his innards itched, like bugs crawling through him. He shuddered.

They were actually nanites. Doctor Zed explained it once while Brick faded in and out of consciousness, bleeding like a stuck pig. The serum was really millions of tiny robots programmed to repair a human body. He could feel them go about their work now, tickling his lungs with their microscopic probes, injecting, scraping, cauterizing... Brick shuddered again and tried not to think about it.

The smell of tobacco filled the room. Slowly, Brick remembered his waking earlier, and the bristly stranger who'd rescued him. Or had Mordecai rescued him? He felt sure the other man hadn't been a Raider.

Nearby, Mordecai laughed. Brick hadn't noticed the two men talking in hushed tones, probably trying not to wake him. Although his muscles cried out in protest and his right arm was still too painful to use, he struggled into a sitting position. He was on the floor, wrapped in a nest of blankets, so he had to look up at everything. It made him feel like a little kid who'd fallen asleep outside and been carried in by his parents.

"Hey," Brick said, sheepishly.

The two men sat in chairs nearby with their backs half-turned to him, leaning over a shabby table. A candle glowed between them. As far as Brick could see, three chairs and a table were all the furniture in the room. When he spoke, they both looked down at him. Mordecai grinned.

"Hey,  _amigo,"_ he said, coming to kneel by his side. From somewhere else in the room, he heard snoring.

"What happened?" Brick asked. His memories became foggy after the necklace broke. He remembered blood and crazed jubilation, but no narrative thread.

"Bool found you. He dragged you into his truck, somehow. He was taking you here when I ran into him. I was gonna come back for you, once you'd stopped being such a wang." Mordecai said.

"Where are we?"

Mordecai paused. "Uh... well... don't freak out or anything, but we're in a bandit camp. Bool lives here. It was closer than New Haven, and you were in bad shape. We can head out when you're ready."

Brick's head throbbed, and he definitely didn't feel ready. "Yeah, okay."

He closed his eyes as a wave of vertigo swept over him. He must have wobbled, because Mordecai's hands shot out to steady him. When the feeling passed, he opened his eyes, but Mordecai didn't pull away. Instead, his fingers fluttered over Brick's bicep.

He hadn't looked at the wound yet. Now he did, and his stomach turned somersaults. The skin had been flayed wide open, probably down to the bone. Even with Zed's nanites, he doubted it would ever look right again.

"It's not too bad. It's not bleeding anymore," Mordecai said.

"You gotta say that. My arm wouldn't look like ground hamburger if you hadn't dumped me in the middle of nowhere," Brick said.

Mordecai flicked him in the nose. " _Baboso,_ " he said, but fondly. Brick grinned like an idiot. Mordecai had pushed up his goggles at some point, so he could see the man's witch-fire green eyes. The affection in them made Brick's heart skip a beat.

"Break it up, lovebirds," said the stranger that Mordecai had called Bool, as if he'd read his mind.

"We're not-" Brick started to say.

"I know, I know, it's jes' an expression. Christing hell, is that thing noisy," Bool complained, looking at something behind Brick. A skag pup laid on the floor, only a few feet away from where he sat, snoring loudly through their conversation.

Although he couldn't be sure, Brick thought it was the one from earlier. He'd forgotten all about it. As if it knew they were talking about it, one of its beady red eyes opened. It let out a long sigh and closed the eye again.

"What's it doin' here?" Brick asked.

"Bool was nice enough to let a big, slobbering animal stay in his house. And he let the skag in, too," Mordecai said, and cracked up at his own joke.

"Cheeky kid," Bool said, and came to sit on the floor next to Mordecai with a groan, holding his back. The man looked to be in his seventies, although he must have been strong to haul Brick's unconscious body into his vehicle. He was a hulking man: Not as big as Brick, but large enough to make six foot and change Mordecai look like a doll beside him. "Can't stop running your ever-lasting mouth. Well. Honestly, I thought the skag was your pet. When I spotted you bleeding in the dirt, I went to check it out, but the damn thing was laying on you. It bit me."

He held up his bandaged hand to show Brick. "I nearly kicked it off ya and shot it in the head, but I got to thinkin that he mighta been your pet, the way he was carrying on after you. It ain't right to kill a man's pet. So I let it follow us into the truck. Now, you're telling me that you don't know this animal?"

Brick looked again at the sleeping skag. "Nope. I think it knows me, though."

That didn't make sense, but Bool accepted the explanation with a nod. The skag finally woke up and clambered across Brick's legs. It looked expectantly up at Bool.

"Whadya want, mutt?" the man asked it. Its eyes were fixed on the pipe in his hand. "Ah, okay, let's show him. Here ya' go." he took a puff from the pipe, held it in, and blew out a perfect ring of smoke. The skag wriggled and jumped after the ring, and snapped it into oblivion with its trisected jaws. Bool cackled.

"You've been sleeping all day," Mordecai explained. "We had to entertain ourselves."

The skag stumbled back over Brick's legs. Without thinking about it, he playfully slapped the pup's flanks, just like he'd used to do with Priscilla. Its whole back end wriggled like it was trying to wag its stump of a tail, and Brick shoved it over on the ground, pulling on its paws and smacking its belly. The pup grinned.

"I don't know how that thing ain't bit your arm off," Bool observed.

Brick shrugged. "Just a thing about dogs. They respect a guy who could beat em' into next week, but pulls his punches."

"If I tried to do that to Bloodwing..." Mordecai didn't continue because he didn't need to elaborate. Brick could imagine what Bloodwing would do to anyone who attempted to rough her up, even playfully.

"Hey, I'm starved," Brick said suddenly. He hadn't noticed before, with the pain radiating from his chest and shoulder, but his stomach gnawed at itself. Bool rummaged through a bag and found some jerky, which was perfectly decent meal on Pandora, better than decent. Brick tore into it with gusto. Bool and Mordecai nibbled too, but mostly drank from a flask passed between them, like old friends. Brick felt an absurd pang of jealousy.

"So I hear you boys was the ones who cleared the Lance out of the Fathoms a few months back," Bool said, in a calculated tone that worried Brick.

"That's us."

Bool took a puff off his pipe. "I was a Lance grunt. I ain't proud of it, but... I served a couple of years. But the Lance, they don't have much need for the frail, not of body or mind." he tapped his temple with one finger.

"I wouldn't call you frail-" Mordecai began, but Bool interrupted him.

"Don't be a kiss-ass, boy," he admonished. "What was I saying? The Lance. I like to think I would'a deserted on my own, once I figured what they was about, but they didn't give me the chance. Because of my twitch."

Brick didn't say anything but he must have looked interested enough, because Bool leaned closer and pointed to his own glassy eye. The pupil had partially glazed over and the iris was pale gray. "When I was young, they was blue. But I go away sometimes, when the reaper's breathing down my neck, mostly, and when I come back..." He shrugged. "A little less of me comes back, err'y time."

Brick opened his mouth to say something, but just then the skag came out of nowhere to pluck the rest of Mordecai's jerky from his hand, almost gently, and carried it off to the corner to eat it in peace. Bloodwing puffed up, threatening to come down off the back of a chair where she roosted. Mordecai grabbed another piece of meat and reached back to feed it to her. She took it but continued to glare at the pup.

"Gad night a livin'," Bool grumbled, pinching his nose between his thumb and forefinger. "I swear, it's like children..."

"What did you mean before, about goin' away?" Brick asked. He was curious about the man's twitch, probably because it reminded him of his own. Bool looked at him for a long moment. His stare gave Brick the same feeling that had come over him when he met the skag pup- a certainty that Bool and his animal could somehow see each other.

"In my mind, son. Anytime my unit got into the bad shite, my mind would just... go. I'd stand there empty on the battlefield, soul gone a' wandering, and somehow live while better men died at my feet."

Nobody said anything for awhile. The only sound was the skag chewing on the jerky. Mordecai looked like he wanted to say something reassuring but not enough to get called a kiss-ass again.

"After a bit, the Lance got sick of it. They wanted to execute me, and I admit, I got scared." Bool said it like 'scairt', with a 't' at the end. "They thought I was a joke, so the guards got drunk on duty, and I slipped away in the night. So I survived again. But they didn't, did they? You made sure of that."

"...Yessir," Brick replied. He felt like he'd regressed to his childhood, and had forgotten to latch the gate again, or hadn't gotten home before dark. His animal coiled, prepared to get out in front...  _Just in case his momma found out. Just in case she was mad._  Which was stupid, because his momma was light years away, but the animal coiled just the same.

But Bool chuckled. "Good boy. Them Lance bastards had it coming."

All of a sudden, Brick couldn't stifle a yawn. He was worried that Bool would take it wrong, but the man only smiled and nodded. "Yep. Coming back from the brink of death will do that to you. I ain't got no beds, though. Mind if we bunk on the floor with you?"

"It's your house," Brick said.

Bool laughed like that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. The skag looked up and trotted over to them, whining. Brick absently patted its head. He didn't know what to think about Bool, with his story that sounded both true and perfectly outrageous. What did he expect, though? The man lived in a bandit camp. Brick supposed that made him a bandit.

Bool blew out the candle and they laid out on the floor in blanket cocoons, lined up from one end of the room to the other, like a pack of hotdogs. The skag laid on Brick's left side, Mordecai on his right, and Bool somewhere out past Mordecai. Brick could hear the bandit snoring almost immediately.

Brick was tired again, and also mad at himself for being so fucking  _weak_. He'd needed to be saved, just like he always did. He thought he'd have more sense by now, not still rushing headlong into everything, not still making stupid mistakes. Brick felt sick and sad, and he missed his sister again, like a wound reopened after thirteen years. He even missed Menoetius.

Something brushed his chest, and he reached up to see what it was. He touched Mordecai's hand. Even in the pitch-black, Brick recognized his slender sniper fingers, which on a more civilized world he might have thought of as pianist fingers, and the long slope of his palm. Over the last few years, Mordecai's hands had become as familiar to him as his own. They laced fingers in the dark. Brick mouthed his nightly prayer and fell asleep halfway through.


	8. Foogs

The morning poked fingers of sunlight into the backs of Brick's eyelids. He scrunched them tighter and groaned. Someone shook his shoulder, and he reluctantly opened his eyes.

"What?" he snapped.

"How's your chest?"

It was Mordecai, kneeling with one hand on Brick's uninjured bicep. Remembering that he had an uninjured bicep, and, following that logic, an injured one, brought the events of the previous day crashing back on him. He scurried to sit up. Pain had settled back into his battered ribs overnight, and he groaned and clutched himself. Mordecai fussed over him with worried hands.

"Take it easy," he ordered.

"'m fine," Brick said, batting Mordecai away. It was true; already, the pain was diminishing into a dull ache.

"You finally up, son? Thought you were gonna sleep all day."

Bool stood over the table and grinned down at Brick. He was missing a few yellow teeth, and he wheezed a laugh through the gaps.

"Thanks for..." Brick paused, not sure what he meant to say. "Letting me stay here."

"Couldn't very well toss you out. Would you like a cup a' joe?"

"...Joe?"

"Coffee, son."

Brick finally noticed the smell hanging heavy in the air: fresh brewed coffee. Heavenly. He didn't usually drink the stuff, but if there was any aroma to elevate the human spirit, it was coffee, and Brick found himself salivating. Mordecai was already up, crowding the table with undisguised excitement.

Light streamed into the shack through the doorway, where a curtain divider had been drawn aside. Steam rising from a percolator became opaque as it passed through the sunlight. The smell was coming from that battered thermos, which sat on a small hotplate. A trio of chipped mugs surrounded it.

"Bool?" A grubby face poked into the doorway.

"Yeah, I'm coming. You bring yer own cup? Don't got no spares today," Bool said gruffly, lifting the percolator from its base.

"Sure did."

The bandit—Brick guessed he was a bandit, anyway, since this was a bandit camp—proudly raised his own dented metal mug, clasped between hands bound in dirty rags. His jacket was in tatters and grimy with dust. He beamed as Bool tipped up the thermos to pour a steaming stream of coffee into his mug.

"Thank you, sir."

"Yee-up."

Two more men took his place as he left, both clutching empty mugs.

"Bunch'a mooches," Bool grumbled, but his white whiskers turned up in a smile as he poured into the first man's outstretched mug.

When he went to dole out the next cup, the bandit didn't grip his mug tightly enough. It slipped through his fingers and clunked to the ground. The sturdy old ceramic didn't shatter, but rolled over to where Brick was sitting, and he picked it up. A wide-eyed kitten stared out from the mug's face.

"Damnit, boy, whats the matter with you?" Bool snapped.

The bandit only gawped at him from behind a pair of opaque goggles, mouth agape. Brick struggled to his feet to return the mug, and the man's companion took it for him.

"Damn, I'm sorry. He's...Look, if you'll pour it here, I'll make sure he drinks it."

"Do ya think he'll care, son? Poor thing's clearly addled. I don't know-"

"Please."

Bool hesitated. "...Alright. But you best not be playing me. You drink all that yer'self, you'll get the runs."

The lucid bandit laughed, a convulsive bark of amusement, and held out the second cup to receive coffee. After Bool filled the mug, he carefully shifted it to the other hand, wincing as the necessity of hooking his finger around both handles forced his knuckles against the hot ceramic. He placed his other palm on the addled bandit's back and patiently led him away.

Bool watched them go before trudging back the table. A new shuffle in his step and glazed look in his eyes betrayed his old age.

"...damn shame," he muttered under his breath.

He poured the remaining liquid into the three mugs on the table. Brick considered stopping him, saying that he didn't drink the stuff, but bit back the words. Today, coffee looked good.

It wasn't. Brick drank the bitter brew because it would be rude not to, taking tiny sips that never seemed to add up. He contributed a little to the conversation, but mostly played with the skag pup who lolled around his heels.

Bool and Mordecai chatted easily, with Mordecai seeming to hang on the bandit's words. Despite Bool's generosity, Brick found himself annoyed by their comfortable exchange.

"Jealous?" Mordecai asked.

Brick blinked and looked up at the two men. They stared back at him expectantly.

"...sorry. I wasn't listenin'."

"You were watching that skag lick its crotch. I just assumed you were jealous."

He looked down and saw that the skag was indeed licking itself, casting its prehensile tongue over whatever parts skags had down there. It had nothing Brick could identify. He'd glazed over while staring in the animal's direction, and hadn't noticed its lewd display.

Brick flushed. "N-no! I just zoned out, 's all."

"Uh-huh, whatever you say," Mordecai teased.

The skag looked up Brick with a jeer in its beady red eye, tongue still wrapped double around its leg to waggle at its crotch. Brick scowled.

He may not have been jealous, but he couldn't help but be impressed.

* * *

"Don't this place look like the junkyard around New Haven?" Brick asked.

"It might be the same one. It goes on for miles, you know. We might be around the back."

"Really?" Brick looked around, amazed.

Of course, one junkyard looked about the same as the next. Heaps of trash had been piled in an approximation of rows. The shortest stacks came up to Brick's shoulders, the tallest sailed high above their heads, briefly blocking out the sun as the two men passed under them. Bloodwing perched on one of the highest heaps. She spotted something behind a row and dove after it, disappearing from view.

Mordecai strode ahead of Brick, his sniper rifle resting over his shoulder. The skag pup bumbled around Brick's feet.

Bool had sent them out to pick off some of the vermin around the dump. Payment for the lodgings, Bool has said, but Brick got the impression he was really being sent out to test his damaged arm. The wound looked better, anyway. Not like hamburger anymore.

 _Just lasagna, maybe,_ Brick thought, looking down as he flexed the limb. The scabs puckered and warped over the muscle, but didn't split.

He spotted a scythid the size of a cat scurrying in the shade of a rusted truck. He hefted his shotgun, a loaner from Bool, and pulled the trigger in one smooth movement. The scythid burst. Its carapace landed in the dirt, smoking. Brick chuckled.

A bandit watched them from the shade of a pile and darted out of sight when he caught Brick looking back at him.

"So these guys are livin' in our backyard."

"Nah. Like I said, its big junkyard. That one time, we walked all day, straight out, and we never reached the end."

"Oh yeah," Brick said. "I remember that. You were bein an asshole."

"What?" Mordecai looked back over his shoulder, a small frown drawing lines around his mouth. "Are you talking about the magazines? I was trying to be nice! I didn't know-"

"I know," Brick said, betraying his teasing intent with a grin.

Mordecai scowled and turned back around. He began walking faster, so Brick had to hurry to keep up with him. The skag pup appeared out of nowhere and dropped something at his feet, so he nearly tripped and pitched over it, but caught himself in time.

It was the scythid carapace, still glistening with buggy goop. The pup grinned up at him. Brick kicked the shell away, and the pup went bounding after it.

"You could have just told me," Mordecai said. Even without seeing his face, Brick could hear the sulk in his voice.

"Oh, yeah, cos you took it so well," Brick said.

"I...well, okay. I guess I could've been better."

Brick snorted. That was an understatement.

That day in the junkyard, he and Mordecai had been digging through the piles to find some idiot's dirty magazines. His wife had thrown them out, so he paid the two mercs to hunt them down. Mordecai had been leafing through the mags as he found them, commenting on every 'sweet rack' or 'tasty trim', trying to show Brick 'the good shots'.

Finally, Brick had gotten fed up and snapped at him to knock it off.

 _Why? You gay or something?_  Mordecai had teased. When Brick had only shrugged, and said, yeah, I am, Mordecai responded with open mouthed amazement.  _No, you ain't. You're pulling my leg. What, really? You're really gay?_

"You asked me all those damn questions. Like, if I was pissing at the same time as another dude, if I looked at their dick. And-"

"Okay, okay, I remember."

"Do you wear dresses? You into any dudes I know? Do you think Roland is hot? How hot, on a scale of one to ten? How about me?"

"Brick, would you shut up! I was an idiot. And you rated me a four, you dick. You gave Roland an eight."

Brick loosed a low, rumbling chuckle. He remembered. That number had been tossed out in frustration. Mordecai's questions had been chapping his ass. But he'd fallen hard for the foul-mouthed little sniper by then, and, if he'd been honest, his real assessment would have been in the ballpark of eleven.

"I liked the other question, though. The one you asked in Old Haven."

"Which one?" Mordecai said, but he paused before asking, and Brick could tell from the thickness in his voice that he knew exactly what he meant.

"If I wanted to fool around."

"Oh, yeah. Nothing serious," Mordecai quoted his past self. "Just friends, letting off steam."

The thought of Mordecai's proposition still made still sent a tingle through Brick's gut. They'd been alone together, holed up outside of Old Haven after a job. While they were undressing, changing out of blood crusted clothes in favor of clean outfits, Brick caught Mordecai looking at him.

They were already jerking each other off when they laid out the rules.  _No kissing,_  Mordecai had said, between shuddering breaths.  _And we don't...tell anyone..._

"You know what's weird?" Mordecai asked, distracting Brick from his dirty thoughts. "We might've met Bool before. We might have met him that day."

"How d'ya mean? I don't-" Bricked stopped, realizing what Mordecai meant. Bool had been a member of the Crimson Lance. When Mordecai and Brick had gone there to investigate the smoke signals rising over the Rust Commons, they'd walked right into Lance trap. They'd barely make it out alive, and had killed dozens of troopers on their way out of the city.

"He could have been shooting at us, and gone into one of his fugues. Shit, that could have been right before the Lance tried to have him killed. You think?"

Brick shrugged, but Mordecai was still walking ahead of him, and didn't see it.

"His what? Foogs?"

"Yeah," Mordecai said. "What did he call it? His twitch. They're dissociative fugues. Some people have this thing...it makes them black out, and not remember anything from that time."

That sounded familiar to Brick. It sounded like his animal. But, for now, he shook it off, and asked; "How do ya know so much about that stuff?"

Mordecai didn't answer for a moment. The skag streaked past them, lunging toward a scythid who beat its wings frantically to get its bulbous body off the ground. It didn't make it in time, and the pup dragged it down. Brick looked away as the skag tore the bug's carapace away from its body with a meaty 'pop'.

"Read about it on the ECHOnet. When my dad was getting worse, I read about all the comorbidies. Depression, fugues, obsessive-compusive behaviors...substance abuse, of course," Mordecai said, with into a dry, humorless laugh. "Not that it helped. I was just looking for...something."

Brick knew a little about Mordecai's dad, but not much; that he was a schizophrenic, untreated for most of Mordecai's life. He rarely mentioned his family.

"Sorry," Brick said.

Mordecai waved dismissively and said nothing ekse. Brick was left to mull over the fugues. If the condition had a name, and Bool had it, he wondered if his animal could be a version of the same thing. But, he didn't think so. Mostly he still believed what his momma told him; that his animal was just a fancied up name for what it really was...the devil.

"Is that Roland?" Mordecai said, startling Brick out of his train of thought. He was pointing to something in the distance. Brick squinted and saw the truck speeding out in the wastes, a plume of dust behind it. The skag chuffed at it.

"Not sure. It looks like his Lancer."

Brick had driven the vehicle back to New Haven himself after the Fathom's liberation, so he recognized it. The Catch-a-Ride stations in the Fathoms were the only ones with clearance to create Atlas vehicles. Brick had known that Roland would love one, so he brought it back as a sort of peace offering for disappearing with Mordecai for six months.

Brick waved to hail the distant vehicle.

"He's going to be pissed at us," Mordecai said. "We were supposed to report back."

Brick lowered his arm, but it was too late. The Lancer had already changed direction and was headed right for them. As it turned out, both Roland and Lilith were in the Lancer, and they did look pissed. Lilith swung herself over the side before the truck rolled to a complete stop.

She stormed up to Mordecai and slapped him across the face.

"Where have you been?" she asked.

"Ow, Lil, that stings. A little. Just a tiny bit." Mordecai grinned. "We got caught up."

"What happened to you?" Roland asked Brick, looking at his mangled arm.

Lilith gasped. "How could you let this happen to Brick?" she cried to Mordecai, and swatted him on the arm.

"How is it my fault? That  _idiota_  lets a skag sneak up on him, and I'm the one who gets hit for it?" Mordecai lamented. Roland pointedly rolled his eyes, and clapped a hand over Brick's uninjured shoulder.

"Got worried about you, soldier. We thought we'd come out here and have a look. Glad you see that you're basically in one piece."

"Sorry we didn't get back. It was touch and go for awhile." Brick raised the arm and shrugged to show Roland the range of movement. "It ain't pretty, but it still works."

"Good, good. Hang on a sec." Roland upholstered his revolver, a custom piece called the Patton. He aimed at something behind Brick, and he was suddenly sure that Roland had his sights on the skag pup.

"Stopthat'smydog!" he cried, the words spilling out in a rush, and he uppercut the butt of the revolver just as Roland pulled the trigger. The shot went wild and smashed out the screen of an old television. Shards of lead glass tinkled down through the scrap heap. Lilith gaped at him.

"That's not a dog," she said.

"I know, I know. It's a skag, but-" Brick started, but he was interrupted by a voice behind him. He jumped when he heard the staccato drawl.

"That's one way to thank someone for rescuing their boy. Another good way is credits, maybe guns. Just a thought," Bool said, apparently unperturbed by being nearly shot. He strolled up alongside Brick, his eyes locked with Roland's.

"I didn't know that. I thought you were..."  _A bandit_ , he didn't say. "I'm Roland, commander of the Crimson Raiders, and this is Lilith." He stuck out a hand. Bool grabbed it, and gave it a big, loose shake before releasing him.

"Co-commander Lilith. Or whatever. You know, the other big boss," she added, and shook Bool's hand as well.

Bool nodded. "Good to meet the both of you. Mordecai and Brick are fine boys. I'm glad to have met them the way I did, since I get the feeling that things would have gone different some other time."

"Let's cut to the chase," Roland said, his face a careful blank. "You want a reward?"

Bool laughed his mad laugh. It seemed to shake the piles around them. "Christ, no! That was a joke, son, don't take me so serious. I'm just a crazy old man. Crazy as bats. But if you're burning to pay me back, I would like to take a poke around your town sometime. I haven't had civilized company in ages."

Roland's expression remained inscrutable. Brick knew how protective Roland was over New Haven, and for a bandit to request access to the town was akin to a stranger asking to hold someone's newborn baby. But Roland remained diplomatic.

"I'll see what I can do. I'm not at liberty to disclose the location without the permission of the town's leader, but I'll talk to her when I get back." Brick was sure he wouldn't. Mordecai seemed to think so too, because he glared daggers into their commander.

"'Course," Bool said with a knowing smile. "You boys leaving, then?" He turned to look at Brick and Mordecai. Brick waited for Mordecai to answer. The smaller man looked conflicted, and didn't reply for a long moment.

"Yeah, I guess. We got Hyperion  _putas_  to deal with."

Bool laughed again, clapped him on the arm, and shook Brick's hand warmly. "You got all your shit with you?"

They did have everything, even Bloodwing and the unnamed skag, which greeted Roland by rolling in some mysterious goop and wiping it off on the his legs. The commander shuddered.

The four old friends rode back to New Haven in companionable quietude.

When their truck rumbled through the town's gates barely an hour later, Brick saw the girl right away. She perched on a rust flecked porch in the shade, legs dangling over the side. Her arms folded across the railing's lowest rung, and she rested her chin on them, eyes closed. She wore a boy's undershirt and shorts. Brick noticed that one of her narrow knees was bruised a nasty purple-yellow.

The stray girl stirred when she heard the truck, auburn eyes blinking, slowly, as she worked to extricate her limbs from the banister.

"Hey! Hey, you!"

Roland pulled in roughly alongside another vehicle. Everyone besides Brick climbed out, Mordecai and Lilith chatting as they swung over the side of the car. The skag jumped out after them, landing clumsily by their feet. Roland smiled at the girl as she ran up to them, her bare feet slapping on the asphalt. Brick tried to disappear into his seat.

"I see you!" The girl shouted, as she passed right by the others to get to Brick, but he was in gunner turret, out of her reach. She pounded on the truck with her fists. "Get down here, you coward!"

"Whoah, kid," Roland said, and hauled her back by the hem of her shirt. She was easily pried from the truck, and in the daylight, Brick saw that he'd guessed her age wrong before. She looked about ten, eleven at most.

"What's your problem with Brick?" Roland asked.

The girl struggled briefly, then stopped to look up at Roland. She studied him for a long moment. She burst into tears. Roland looked immediately like he'd rather be anywhere else. He cast a desperate look to Lilith, but she only shrugged.

"He stole my mommy's necklace!" the girl wept. "It's all I have left, and he took it!"

Brick sunk even lower in his seat as Roland glared at him. "Did he now?"

"It's right on his neck. I can see it!"

"Brick," Roland said simply.

"You gonna trust this kid over me?" Brick asked, not sure why he bothered. Roland gave him that look that said he wouldn't believe him no matter what he said.

And, of course, Brick had stolen the necklace. He would have called it 'borrowed', but... He lifted the necklace over his head, unclasped it, and slid one of the keys off of it. He dropped it over the side. The stray girl caught it, and stopped crying immediately.

"Thanks, you big bastard," she said, pocketing the trinket.

"This ain't over, kid. I'll find you," Brick said. It came out more menacingly than he'd intended. He was pissed off, partly by the girl, but even more by Roland.

"Probly will," she said, repeating Brick from before, and swung around on her heels. She skipped away without looking back. The skag pup followed her for awhile, until it realized its mistake and returned to Brick, looking sheepish.

Roland gaped at Brick as he climbed out of the truck. "Were you threatening a child?"

"I'd never hit a girl! Well, not a little girl. Momma taught me better than that. Anyway, you don't know the whole story."

"Then why don't you tell me?"

Brick snarled, rankled by the holier-than-thou tone that had crept into Roland's voice.

"Fuck off,  _Dad_."

Roland put his hands on his hips. "Don't be childish. I was going to ask if you'd want to go with Lilith and I on the mission to the Enclave, but-"

"But what? You gonna ground me? I'll go wherever I want," Brick said.

"Not as a member of the Crimson Raiders, you won't."

Brick stepped closer, until his face was mere inches from Roland's. Shoulders squared, he towered over the commander.

"You gonna throw me out? Or are you gonna execute me, instead? I know your Lance buddies would'a."

Lilith rushed over and wedged herself between the two men. "Stop it! You're both acting stupid. Brick, of course you'll go with us to the Enclave. We couldn't do it without you. Mordecai?"

Brick and Roland glared at each other over her shoulder, and Mordecai just looked like he wanted to be somewhere else. He scratched Bloodwing's head with a finger.

"Uh, yeah 'course Lil. We'll all be there. Like old times."

Brick turned and stormed off. Before he could round the first corner, someone caught him by the arm. He swung around. Lilith flinched away, but her face remained stern and set, even as she took a startled step backward. Over her shoulder, Brick saw Roland and Mordecai still hanging around the Lancer. Their mouths opened and closed, but Brick had stomped too far away to hear what they were saying.

"Roland's right. You're acting like a baby."

"Whaddya expect? He treats me like a baby! Me an' Mordy both. It's like, after we went and did all that stuff in the Fathoms, you guys changed while we were gone." Brick paused. "It's like you grew up, and suddenly we were too immature for you. You all were busy with your Raider stuff-"

"Don't try to make  _us_  the bad guys. You didn't even tell anyone you were leaving. For all we knew, you two had been captured, or killed."

Brick couldn't figure out an argument for that, so he simply said; "Yeah, but still."

"Yeah?" Lilith said. She had Brick beat, and the gleam in her eye knew it.

"We came back."

"After six months!"

Brick scoffed. "Okay, yeah. But now it's like we ain't a team at all. Just you and Roland, bossing us around all the time."

"We wouldn't have to order you around so much if you and Mordecai weren't always off playing grab-ass."

"Nobody's grabbin' any asses," Brick snapped. He could feel a flush start under his collar and spread upward, to where Lilith could see it. "I gotta go. I'll meet you later, okay? At the HQ?"

Lilith gave him a weird look: Sadness, of almost puppy dog proportions. Then she straightened up and became Lilith again- indomitable, irreverent, bad tempered Lilith. "Whatever. I guess I'll make sure Roland doesn't try to sneak out without you."

Brick nodded. He meant to swing around without a thank-you or a backward comment, but he caught sight of something behind Lilith that stopped him. Roland had gone off somewhere, but Mordecai had been joined by someone else. Moxxi leaned against the Lancer's mud-streaked side, one hip stuck out, a manicured hand sliding up Mordecai's front. Blood rushed to Brick's ears, filling his head with a thrum: the whump, whump, whump of his own anxious heart.

He watched, oblivious to Lilith's confusion and snapped fingers - meant to garner his attention - as a coy smile curled around the corners of Moxxi's painted lips. Brick stared on helplessly as she her fingers tightened around Mordecai's scarf, as she pulled him close, grinned something against his lips, and kissed him.


	9. Barring Incident

Brick reclined in the Lancer, staring pointedly away from where Roland sat in the driver's seat. He turned a grenade over and over in his hands. Marcus had sold it to him before he left, some new Vladof mod that was supposedly spectacular. Of course, Marcus had impressed on him that he couldn't demonstrate within the town limits, or Peirce would have his hide, so Brick had to buy it at his word. Probably junk, but he didn't give a shit about creds, so-

"Would you stop playing with that? You're going to blow us up," Roland said.

Brick silently snarled, but clipped the grenade back into its place on his bandolier without argument. They just had to get through the drive. Barring incident, they would arrive at the Enclave in a little under two hours. Brick focused on the horizon.

Dawn painted the distant cliffs purple. They looked like watercolors, sort of streaky and out of focus, and, when Brick squinted, the sand could have been fields of golden wheat. In this light, he might have been back on Menoetius.

The skag pup curled up in his lap, fast asleep. He'd had to take it on the mission because nobody wanted to watch it. He'd almost strong-armed Andy into it, but then the pup bit him, and the coward said he wouldn't do it after all, no matter how much Brick insulted his yellow belly and his mother and his manhood. Brick couldn't be sure, but he thought that the skag had grown in the past few days. It might have even doubled in size.

He reclined in the seat, drifting in and out of consciousness. In a half-dream, he sat on the ground in back of his childhood home. He leaned against the house's clapboard siding, shaded by the unfinished pine porch, with the sap smell of raw wood tickling his nose. He watched Priscilla wallow in the mud nearby. She rolled a bone around in the muck, worrying it with her teeth, making a terrific mess. Brick laughed, and she looked up at him with that jubilant, overblown grin that is the exclusive property of the bully breeds. Her eyes were full of trust. She didn't know yet.

Brick's animal began to pace, back and forth, back and forth, waking him up, obscuring the memory. That was fine; he had no desire to go back there.

"Anal Tsunami," Lilith said, breaking the long silence between them.

She sat beside Mordecai in the back, slumped against his shoulder, performing maintenance on her Maliwan twins, Pyra and Electra. She scrubbed out Electra's dual accessory casing, wiped the film out of both compartments, and inserted a fresh elemental pod into each module.

"Anal what?" Mordecai asked.

"It's a game. You put the word anal before the model of gun. Electra is a Tsunami, so, anal Tsnunami."

Mordecai laughed. "That's awful. What's Pyra? A Hellfire, right?"

"An anal Hellfire," Lilith confirmed.

"Oh, man," Mordecai, voice cracking with amusement. Brick failed to suppress a chuckle of his own.

Lilith finished maintenance on Pyra and clapped the gun back together. "Sounds like something you'd get from screwing Moxxi."

"Hey," Mordecai said. "She's actually really cool, when you get to know her."

"Ohh, I forgot. You've got a crush on her, right?" Lilith teased.

"Anal Masher," Brick interrupted. He didn't want to hear anything else about Mordecai and Moxxi. After he saw them kissing, he'd had gotten the hell out of there, and hadn't spoken to Mordecai since. "Wait, got a better one. The anal Blister."

Lilith crowed in the backseat.

"Anal Patton," Roland mused. "Anal Ogre. Mine aren't funny."

"The anal Ogre is a little funny," Mordecai said.

Roland sighed. "Not really."

Brick noticed, suddenly, how the bright blue sky mottled toward yellow just over the cliffs, like the bruise on the stray girl's knee.

"What's that?" he asked, pointing.

"Looks like clouds," Mordecai said. "Maybe it'll rain. Wouldn't that be wild?"

Lilith sighed. "Don't even joke about that. I would kill for good thunderstorm. If anything gets me off this rock someday, it'll be how much I miss rain."

 _Brick's_  eyes remained fixed on the bruised skyline. He didn't hope for rain. As a kid, he always thought that he could smell the worms coming out of the damp ground...a sour guts smell. Something about those toxic yellow clouds didn't sit right with him. His arms broke out in gooseflesh.

The skag woke abruptly. It lifted its head and sniffed the air, looking left and right. In the back, Bloodwing rustled anxiously.

"What's wrong, Blood?" Mordecai asked, as if the bird could answer him. She looked up, and he followed her gaze. "Oh sh-"

Something slammed into the hood of the Lancer, missing Roland by bare inches. His head slammed into the windshield. On his belt, his energy shield sounded a low-charge beep over the crunch of metal. Dust filled the air, blocking out the sun.

Their assailant glowed red hot against the veil of debris, as though it had plummeted through the atmosphere on its way to them. It stood up with a  _tic-tic-tic_ _s_ ound. A Hyperion gun loader.

Brick's seat had been twisted by the impact, and he struggled to free himself. He wriggled out just before the loader opened fire. Ratatatatat, its machine gun sprayed the seat where he'd just been. The skag pup had already bolted from the vehicle.

The Loader stood up at its full height, feet planted on the wrecked remains of their Lancer. Brick sidestepped one of the its hydraulic legs as it stomped down. The loader took aim at Roland and unloaded a full clip into his shield, popping the hexagonal grid in a shower of fireworks.

Brick stepped back and charged at the robot, ramming it with all his strength. His own shield registered a blip of damage from the force of his collision. The loader toppled over, landing the vehicle's shell, and buckled the hood in half.

Something zinged past Brick, centimeters from his nose.

"Damnit, Brick!" Mordecai shouted over the clatter of gunfire. "Don't get right up on the targets! I almost shot you!"

More loaders slammed into the dust around them. The terrain was bad for a skirmish, softer than the hard-packed dirt over most of Pandora. Every impact sent up a billowing plume of dust that obscured their line of sight.

Brick reached over his shoulder to retrieve his shotgun.

"Suck on this!" he cried. The gun jumped in his hand. A burst of lead obliterated the yellow paint around a loader's chest and shoulder, and the its gun-wielding arm fell off into the dirt.

A sniper round punched into its single red eyeball. It flashed and went dark, and the loader rocked backwards. The electrified round ricocheted noisily inside its body, sending sparks fizzling from its joints. Some vital circuit blew with a resounding POP, and the loader collapsed.

"We double teamed that guy," Brick said.

"Yeah _,_ we rocked his world," Mordecai replied, already lining up a shot on another loader.

Bullets zinged off his shield, the resultant white flashes reflected in his goggles. He pulled the trigger and another loader's optic sensor burst. It dropped at once, glitchy holograms flashing over its head.

He whistled. "My big gun blew his mind."

Roland looked over his shoulder to shout over the cacophony. "Are the one-liners really necessary?"

He laid into a pair of PWR loaders with his Ogre assault rifle. Their weight bearing arms spun like turbines, reflecting the first few shots into Roland's shield. He shifted his aim to their exposed legs. The knee joints exploded and they collapsed forward into the sand, arms carving the cracked earth until they burned out.

"Absolutely _necessary."_

 _Mordecai_  whipped his blade out of the scabbard on his back, then drove it deep into the armpit of another loader. Something inside it yammered and sparked. He slid his sword out and kicked the smoking shell backwards.

"Like, right now, I have to say that I just stuck it to that  _puto_ _._ "

"He's gonna feel that in the morning," Brick agreed.

Roland looked to Lilith for sympathy, but she was cackling too. Brick couldn't tell if she was laughing at their banter, or at the scrap heap in front of her, which had been several loaders before Pyra and Electra had done their work. Now only a smoking pile of debris remained. Acid pooled around the pile, scorching the metal hulls with a smell like burning rubber, and fire engulfed the whole mess. She looked back at her friends with flames dancing in her eyes.

"They should see Zed about that burning sensation," she said, and burst into gales of laughter at her own joke. Roland threw up his hands.

The friends cut down one loader after another. Lilith fired on a PWR-loader and accidentally pegged herself with one of Electra's caustic-shock rounds. It rippled blue and green across her energy shield, which beeped and went dark as the charge depleted.

"Crap!" she cried, and blinked out of existence, leaving behind a brief purple shimmer.  _Phasewalk._ Brick barely noticed.

He'd strayed from the group to take on enemies where the dust hung thickest in the air. He stood alone in the haze, emptying clip after clip into the shadowy shapes of loaders. Their SOS holograms periodically lit up the dust cloud, making Brick feel like he was battling through a thunderhead.

"Wait up, Brick! There might be-" Roland started, but at that moment, a high pitched whine filled Brick's ears.

_Shitshitshitshitshit_ _._

Brick backpedaled, but the EXP loader was already too close. Its power core overloaded, and it exploded in white-hot light. The cloud boomed with lighting again. Chunks of metal slammed into his energy shield, which quickly flared out.

"You okay?" Roland called. Brick couldn't see him through the curtain of sand.

"I'm good," he yelled back.

Another black and yellow striped loader streaked out of nowhere, running directly toward him, its blue power core spitting. Close, too close to escape. Brick braced himself for the blast, for the pain of his flesh stripping away, and-

The EXP-loader let out its high pitched cry and exploded, but the pain never came.

Brick opened his eyes. Sparks rained down and were gobbled up by a white hexagonal field. An energy shield, much larger than their personal units. Roland's turret stood beside Brick, auto-locking onto targets and blowing them away with the steady thrum of automatic gunfire.

Roland extended a hand down to Brick. He clasped it, and the commander hauled him to unsteady feet.

"Cock blocked," Roland said.

It wasn't a very good one-liner, but Brick laughed anyways, giddy and weak with relief. Mordecai's voice called from somewhere in the distance.

"Guys?"

The turret had fallen silent, finding no more targets to lock onto. Brick remembered the skag with burgeoning dread. The turret would have registered it as hostile wildlife, as a target. All Brick could do now was pray.

The loaders had all been dispatched, but the air showed no sign of clearing. In fact, the particles were now whipped by a sudden wind. Roland's turret ran out of its limited charge and folded back into its portable form with a soft whirring sound. Without the energy shield, the frenzied sand stung Brick's skin. The veil around them had grown opaque.

"Mordy?" he called.

He stumbled forward in the general direction of his friend's voice. Roland disappeared behind him. Brick found himself alone. He opened his mouth to yell for Roland, for anyone, but the roaring sands drowned him out.

Panic burst in his chest like a flock of starlings as the sandstorm folded around him.


	10. The Apple

Brick stumbled through the whipping sands, hands outstretched, groping blindly.

He might have been scared that the winds would cease, that the sand would shush back down to earth, entombing him beneath the dunes. But his terror was more animal than that. He was already entombed, because he was back in the cellar...back in that dank, foul smelling pit, where he'd once been sure he heard the bird king's song. Only, there was something worse down there. Something real. Something worse than Hell itself, and Brick was back trapped with it, smelling that sour guts smell and knowing its source, and howling over the force of the storm.

He was blinded by the grit in his eyes and by his animal, which coiled thickly through his mind but refused to relieve him. In another second, he would have fallen to his knees. That second was enough to save him. Something touched his outstretched hand.

Long, familiar fingers brushed his own calloused digits and intertwined with them. Mordecai gripped his hand tightly.

"Follow me," he yelled, though his voice was a whisper against the roaring storm. "I saw a cave, I think, before shit got bad."

Brick nodded dumbly. He kept a white knuckled grip on Mordecai's hand as he followed him through the curtains of sand.

They trekked for what seemed like forever and no time at all, until, at last, they reached a wall of stone. Mordecai felt around the rock face, scrabbling, searching. Soon he found the crack. His palm met no resistance, and he lurched forward, dragging Brick along with him. The two men spilled into a cave.

The cavern was dark and unknowable deep. In that void, weak light from Brick's shield reflected off of two crimson orbs: a pair of eyes. They stared into Brick, saw his frenzied animal, and soothed it. They blinked at each other in the secret language of beasts.

It was the skag pup, safe after all.

He slapped the ground to beckon the pup, and it romped over to him with a joyous chuff. It seemed even larger than the last time he saw it, though that may have been the weak glow from their shield readouts playing tricks on his eyes. He gathered the wriggling, nipping, whining pup into his arms. Its playful bites made Brick remember Bloodwing. With a sinking feeling, he looked back at Mordecai.

He found the man tugging at the long scarf wrapped around his chest. Something wriggled in a bundle there, and a feathery head poked out. Bloodwing blinked and looked up at her master, head cocked. She seemed to ask,  _What was THAT about?_  A relieved laugh burst from Brick, and he laid back against the cool stone floor. The storm wailed outside.

"I hope Roland and Lil are okay," Mordecai said.

Brick groaned and rested a forearm over his aching eyes. "I'm sure they made it. Lil's got her phasewalk. She probably grabbed Roland, and...I dunno, got to the truck. I'm sure they're fine," he said, trying to convince himself as much as Mordecai. All he knew was that he didn't want to go back outside.

Mordecai nodded, slowly. "Yeah," he said, sounding unsure.

Bloodwing freed herself from the scarf. She shook sand out of her feathers and started to preen, while the skag watched her hungrily.  _That might be a problem,_  Brick thought. At least for now, the pup was small enough that Bloodwing could claw its eyes out if it got out of line, but that would change if it kept growing at this rate.

Brick heard a rattling sound. He sat up, looked over at Mordecai, and saw the man fiddling with something. It turned out to be a silver flask. He unscrewed the lid and took a swig from it, then offered it to Brick.

"Thanks," he said, and accepted the flask. He took a large swig. Its contents tasted like piss, so he grimaced, and passed it back.

"What the hell? You drank like half of it," Mordecai complained.

Brick shrugged. "Sorry. I got a big mouth."

Mordecai took another swallow and grumbled under his breath about how it sure was a big mouth, big and dumb, and possibly something about how he wanted to put it to work, although Brick might have imagined that last part. It wouldn't be the first time.

They sat in the dark for awhile, chatting and listening to the storm. Brick wanted to explore the cave, but it would be impossible without light.

"You got a flashlight or somethin?" he asked.

Mordecai rummaged around in his pockets. He retrieved something that looked promising, but it turned out to be a second flask, this one cylindrical.

"You have two flasks and no flashlight?" Brick said.

"Oh, lay off. I don't give you a hard time about looking like a damn jewelry store, with all those rings and your necklace, do I?" Mordecai said.

Brick wasn't sure how alcoholism could be compared to accessorizing, especially since he only wore rings to make a mess out of his opponents' faces, but he didn't argue. They drank some more, passing the flask back and forth until it ran out, and started in on the second one. At least it contained something slightly more palatable. The liquor tasted pleasantly minty and burned hard on the way down. Brick's head swam after only a couple swigs.

The skag pup had been dozing on the floor, but suddenly it stood up and retched. Brick looked over just in time to see it vomit up a pile of... well, he wasn't sure. He spotted some bones in there, and hair, and something that might have been an eyeball.

"Whoah!" Mordecai exclaimed, scooting away. "Those look a lot worse when they're fresh."

They'd both kicked open mummified skag piles to loot for the gear of devoured adventurers, but only after the wiggly bits had crusted over.

"Wish we had light. Then we could get away from the puke smell, if the cave's big enough," Mordecai said, then considered for a moment. "What guns did you bring?"

Brick had worn his SDU modified bandolier, so he had four: Priscilla the masher, his Matador shotgun, a Mongol rocket launcher, and the Draco assault rifle. He listed them for Mordecai.

"You're still lugging around the Mongol? You never use that thing!" Mordecai said.

"I might need it someday. Then I'll have it."

"Whatever. Hey, hand me the Draco."

"What're you gonna do to her?" Brick asked.

"Don't worry, I can fix it later," Mordecai assured him.

Brick unclipped the assault rifle from his hip, and thought about the gun parts rolling around Mordecai's floor and hesitated. "Mordy, come on, it's a legendary factory defect. I can't just pick up a new one."

"Do you wanna sit here in the freezing, stinking dark, or do you want a fire?"

Brick wanted the fire. He reluctantly passed the assault rifle to Mordecai, who laid it across his lap, pausing only to push his grimy goggles up to his forehead. The sniper got down to business. His fingers worked deftly over gun. After a bit, he snapped something out with a grunt, and held it up to the light of his shield to see it better. He shook the cartridge, and it started to glow orange, very faintly. Brick guessed it was the igniter fluid.

But Mordecai had more work to do, and after a little while, Brick zoned out, only wincing anytime Mordecai bent a piece of metal in a way that it wasn't meant to bend. "You big baby," Mordecai admonished, and kicked Brick's boot. In the end, he'd rigged up some contraption, and the rest of the Draco lay in unidentifiable pieces on the ground. Brick looked at them morosely.

Mordecai wrapped his finger around what used to be a trigger, and pulled. A flame danced in the dark metal ring, at first translucent and wavering, but growing in size. Soon a respectable fire crackled in the heart of the device

"How'd you do that?" Brick asked, impressed in spit of himself.

"I never told you? I grew up in a junkyard. In a shitty, broke-ass trailer. Nothing but junk for miles around, and no neighbors. No other kids. Just...Junk. So, I played with a lot of junk," Mordecai said.

"That's sad."

Mordecai snorted. "You're one to talk. What did you do for fun as a kid? Strangle cats? Blow up mailboxes?"

"I'd never strangle a cat!" Brick cried, appalled.

"It was a joke. Although, sometimes I wonder how well I know you."

The skag crawled over Brick's legs and sprawled across the floor, too big to fit all that way in his lap anymore. "You know me," he said, stroking the skag's ridged back. "There ain't much to know."

"That's what I thought when I first met you. I thought, here's a guy with no thought in his head but violence, probably a real  _idiota estupido-"_

"Hey!"

Mordecai waved off his objection. "Don't get your panties twisted, I'm not finished. I don't think that anymore. Now I think... fuck, I don't know. It's like there's two of you. There's the Brick that I once saw pull the skull out of a midget, crush it in his hand and laugh about it. I kind of like that guy, even though he scares the shit out of me. Then there's this other Brick. I  _really_  like him. That  _guey_ is sweet. He makes me laugh when I'm pissed off, and he can make friends with a damn skag, and he doesn't seem to notice how amazing that is." He stopped and ran a hand through his dreads, embarrassed. "That sounds... It's just the storm, making me say crazy stuff."

"You're a girl," Brick accused.

" _You're_  a girl," Mordecai snapped.

"I guess that makes us lesbians!" Brick roared, so it echoed through the cave- esbians, sbians, bians, ians...- and realized that he was more drunk than he thought. Mordecai grinned behind his fingers, blushing. He cleared his throat.

"I guess we should check this place out, since we got light now," Moredecai said, flicking the makeshift lantern. Brick shoved the skag off his lap and stood up.

They traipsed deeper into the cave, stumbling sometimes, catching each other and giggling. Brick forgot about the storm. He forgot about their friends, and Amanda, and everything else. He was awash in a pleasant buzz and had Mordecai hanging on his arm, laughing and hurling Spanish insults with a lopsided grin, so when the cave narrowed into a tunnel, it didn't frighten him.

They made their way deeper into the cave, ringed by the lantern's orange halo. Brick didn't worry about getting back because there seemed to be no offshoots. That was good, because neither of them were sober enough to navigate. He didn't notice the purple glow until they stumbled into a chamber.

Mordecai gasped. Brick shrank away from the alarming beauty of it, so unexpected after the long, winding darkness.

The cavern spanned only a few meters across and dead-ended. It throbbed with ghostly purple light, shifting and pulsing, like shadows on fire. Purple ore erupted from the walls and floor. Some of the crystalline formations looked like sea urchins made of glass, a hundred times their regular size, while others grew in stranger shapes, almost man-made in their peculiar symmetry. Those were awful. They made Brick think of the things in the Garden, those alien and somehow terrible structures, and his stomach twisted in knots.

"What are they?" Mordecai asked.

"I dunno. They give me the creeps," Brick said. Something about that pale, subterranean light made his skin crawl and his insides itch, as though nanites worked through him.

Mordecai stepped up to one on the formations. Brick had the irrational impulse to shout at him to stay back, but he didn't have to, because Bloodwing flapped off the man's shoulder in a flurry of feathers, shrieking with alarm.

"What's the matter, Blood?" Mordecai asked, rushing to where she landed on the ground. He scooped her up and Brick could see her trembling in his hands. Mordecai looked back at the crystals, slack-jawed.

"Let's get outta here," Brick said, and took him by the elbow. He tried to lead him away, but Mordecai stood transfixed, staring into the throbbing heart of the room. Purple sparks danced in his eyes.

Brick could think of nothing else to do, so he pulled him more firmly. He half led, half dragged Mordecai into the tunnel.

Now the enclosed space did scare him, but not as much as Mordecai's strange behavior. The rangy man seemed disconnected. He let himself be led like a child, putting up no willful resistance, but sagging, somehow. Brick tried to talk to him while they made their way back to the cave's entrance and received no reply. His buzz transformed into a haze of anxious confusion.

Finally, after what seemed like hours of stumbling through the intestinal tract of the planet, the tunnel opened out. The skag pup still slept on the ground. It opened one disinterested eye when they staggered in.

Brick turned to look at Mordecai, and his heart sunk when he saw the expression on his face. The light in his eyes had vanished, as though his soul were somewhere else.  _A fugue?_  Brick wondered. He shook his friend's shoulders.

"Mordy! Wake up!"

Mordecai blinked. He seemed to become aware, and Brick breathed a sigh of relief. Too soon, maybe.

"Radiation," Mordecai whispered.

"Huh?" Brick said.

"Whatever those stones were, they must have been putting off radiation, some subatomic, cancerous cells, something like that, to make Blood so nervous..." Mordecai muttered. Bloodwing had been more than nervous. Even now, with the spires out of sight, Brick could see her heart throbbing through her feathers. "Some things are radioactive, you know, and if you don't have the right gear... I mean, if you don't have any tin, or you lose your tin totem, you might... it might..." Mordecai blinked again.

He had the most heartbreaking look of confusion in his eyes, so Brick wrapped his arms around the smaller man, and felt that he was shaking.

"I don't wanna die," Mordecai said. His voice had taken on a childish quality, thick and slurry. "She didn't listen. She didn't wear her tin totem, and she died. I don't...I..."

Brick didn't know what to do. He took Mordecai by the shoulders and tried to meet his gaze, but he was looking at something else, at a landscape in his mind. Bloodwing managed to do what Brick couldn't. The bird dug her talons into Mordecai's exposed skin, and he yelped.

"Blood! What the-" he looked around, and seemed surprised. He regarded Brick with suspicion. "What're you doing?"

"You freaked out!" Brick cried out, in both shock and relief. "You got all weird, and said a bunch of stuff about radiation. You said it killed someone."

Mordecai rubbed his eyes. His hands remained there, covering his face, and he took a shaky, laughing breath. "The apple don't fall far from the tree, huh?" he muttered, so quietly that Brick barely heard him. Gooseflesh erupted over his skin, even worse than it had around the crystals, as a shudder gripped him.

For a moment he thought of an animal tearing through his childhood home. Not his animal, but a larger one, one that wouldn't protect him. It seemed enormous to the small boy who cowered in his room. It crowed his name in the hall and pounded its fists against the walls, mindless with fury.

 _The apple don't fall far from the tree,_  Brick mused, and held Mordecai gently.


	11. The Tree

The storm howled on outside. Mordecai converted the lantern into an open flame, and the two men sat silently around the fire. Mordecai hadn't brought up his panic attack, or fugue, or whatever it had been, but Brick could think of nothing else.

After the incident, they'd found another path curving away from the main chamber, free of the purple growths, and killed a craw worm that ambushed them there. Now Mordecai roasted it over a spit that he'd made out of another gun- one of his own, this time. He sat with his knees pulled up to his chest, turning the spit slowly with one hand.

"Who were you talking about? Who died?" Brick asked. He hadn't meant to, but the words tumbled out unbidden.

Mordecai glared. "My mom."

"Oh, God. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to-"

"She's not really dead."

Brick blinked. "...Huh?"

Mordecai didn't say anything else, so Brick looked away, down at the skag. It looked back at him with a perplexed head tilt.  _You and me both, pup._  Across the fire, Mordecai sighed and rubbed his temples.

"Listen, I don't want to talk about it. That shit was bad, but I wouldn't change it if I could. It made me strong. And now that it's over, I don't like to think about it."

Brick understood that. "Yeah," he said. Silence. Shuffling.

"Can you just drop it?" Mordecai snapped.

I didn't say nothin'!"

Mordecai groaned. "I just feel weird, okay? I can't stand you thinking that I'm crazy like my old man. I worry about it enough, I don't want you to worry about it too."

"I don't think you're crazy," Brick said.

"Thanks, I guess." Mordeai fidgeted for a moment. "I'm gonna tell you some stuff now, just to explain. Don't interrupt, okay? Just let me say everything."

Brick nodded.

"Okay. I told you my dad is schizophrenic. He never wanted to take his meds, so my mom had to sneak them into his food, but then he wouldn't eat, so she had to stop doing that. It was torture on her, watching my dad slip away. Watching him turn into this... other person. She couldn't take it, so she left. I was six." He paused, thinking. "My dad was really out of his mind by then, and he always told me that she died, even though I knew she didn't, because she sent me a card every year for my birthday."

Brick wanted to say something, some consolation, but he remembered that Mordecai asked him not to interrupt, so he only nodded.

Mordecai took a deep breathe and continued. "He was obsessed with radiation. It was all he ever talked about. How it came out of microwaves and televisions and some fish, and how we could protect ourselves with tin, tin totems. Day and night, radiation. I think, in his messed up head, he really believed that radiation killed my mom. That she was really dead."

Mordecai slumped. Brick didn't know that to say.

"That sucks," he said at last.

"Yeah. I don't hate him, though. We had good times, more when I was younger. He was a lot like Bool when he was good." He scratched his beard, thoughtfully. "I still loved him. My dad, I mean."

"That makes it worse, don't it?" Brick said.

Mordecai looked surprised and studied him for a long moment. "It does," he said eventually.

He turned the spit once more, seemed to decide that it was finished, and pulled it off the fire. It slipped while he was lowering the awkward burden to the ground, and his fingers grazed the hot shell. " _Mierda!"_ he cried, shaking his hand.

Brick scooted around the fire to sit beside him, close, so their knees touched. He grabbed Mordecai's wrist.

"What're you-" Mordecai snapped, as Brick licked his scalded fingers. At first the smaller man swore and yanked them away, hurting worse than ever, but then Brick blew softly on them. He stopped struggling.

"That actually feels better."

"It's a trick I learned as a kid. I, uh...I was clumsy," Brick explained.

" _No manches,_ " Mordecai said, and although Brick didn't know what the words meant, Mordecai's meaning was plain by the way his dark eyebrows went up, and how his mouth formed a sarcastic 'o' _._

Brick launched himself at Mordecai and knocked him over, one hand sweeping up to keep his head from hitting the ground. He pinned the smaller man with his body. "Not so clumsy now," Brick gloated. Mordecai wriggled under him, laughing.

"You surprised me!" he accused.

"Okay." Brick sat up, and Mordecai rose to his knees, panting. "Do your worst."

Mordecai lunged at him. He threw all his weight at Brick's chest, pushing, pulling, even scratching in a last ditch attempt to budge the man, but Brick sat unflappably on the ground and feigned a yawn.

"You're a freak!" Mordecai cried eventually.

"They grow 'em big on Menoetius."

"Big's an understatement. I think they used some experimental fertilizer on you,  _amigo._ "

Mordecai wound up in Brick's lap, somehow, hands braced against his chest, close enough that Brick could smell the booze on his breath- that peculiar mint smell. He wondered if he'd still be able to taste it if he kissed him. Brick pushed the thought aside, and instead pawed at the other man's hips, working his fingers under the scarf where it tied around his waist. Mordecai's skin felt like smooth, hot stone under his touch.

Mordecai ignored his groping and fished around in a pocket. When his hand reemerged, he triumphantly held a pack of cigarettes.

"Two flasks, a pack of cigs, and no flashlight," Brick pointed out.

"Yeah, yeah. Blow it out your ass," Mordecai said, but with no malice. He smacked the box on his wrist and pulled out a cigarette, then lit it with the open flame. He took a drag and blew it out into Brick's face.

"Asshole," the larger man coughed, waving away the smoke.

Mordecai puffed once more before taking the cigarette out and sticking it between Brick's lips. He didn't usually smoke, but after the stressful day he'd had, he was willing to star. He sucked in deeply. The smoke filled his his lungs with an unfamiliar tickle, one that felt both good and itchy. He erupted into a fit of explosive coughing, and it was Mordecai's turn to laugh.

"You're kind of a wuss, babe," Mordecai said. The endearment made Brick's heart skip a beat, but then the other man looked thoughtful. "Shit, sorry. I was talking to Moxxi earlier."

"Yeah?" Brick said, hoping his friend wouldn't hear the disappointment in his voice.

"I always call her babe. Oh, hey, did you see? She kissed me! Can you believe it?" His grin was a dagger in Brick's heart.

"Great."

"What's wrong? Jealous?" Mordecai teased. Brick didn't reply. "Wait. Are you?"

He grabbed the smaller man's thighs and dug his nails in, thrust their hips together, making Mordecai grunt. It was all he could do. It didn't feel safe to answer a loaded question like that, didn't feel like following the rules. They might have broken them already. Brick's animal paced around the edges of his vision, back and forth, just in case he needed to be rescued.

Mordecai scowled. "Dammit, I wish you'd say what you want. I'm sick of guessing."

"What do you want me to say?" Brick asked.

"I don't know! But I start getting close to someone, and you act all jilted. We've been screwing around for so long. I know we said it was just sex, but that was ages ago, and I started thinking that you'd... I don't know... kiss me, or something. Say that you want to be with me, like boyfriends. Not that I want to. I mean, maybe I would, but... I thought...  _Caquita!_  I don't have to explain myself. You're the one who-"

"Mordy?" Brick interrupted.

"What?"

"Do you ever shut up?"

Mordecai actually opened his mouth to reply, but Brick silenced him with a kiss. Their noses bumped, their lips met artlessly.

Mordecai stiffened with surprise, then relaxed against Brick's mouth. His arms reached up to wrap around the larger man's broad shoulders. They opened their mouths to each other, eager after so many months of holding back. Mordecai didn't taste like mint. A bit like smoke, but mostly indescribable sweetness. They kissed for a gloriously long while. When they finally sat back, Brick was shaking all over.

It was his first kiss in over twenty years. It was worth the wait.

He reached up, fingers tangling in the smaller man's dreads, while Mordercai's hands ghosted across his scars. He studied those old wounds with dark intensity. Brick's heart hammered out of control as Mordecai kissed the curved scar across his lips.

His mind reeled back, despite his animal's warning snarl, to the time he received that scar. But first to the good part, to the boy next door. The only other boy he'd ever kissed.

Brick saw his face so clearly- green eyes, a smattering of freckles across his nose, and ears that stuck out too far from his head. The boy's mother always told him that he would grow into them, but at fourteen, he still had what Brick's dad colloquially called 'car doors'. He never did grow out of them.

 _Because he never came home for dinner. Only fourteen, he went out one day and didn't come home, and his mother waited up all night, but he never..._  Brick's animal raged now, trying to throw the red up in front of his eyes. Normally he would have let it. He would let his animal wrap him in its nerveless, reptilian coils and keep him safe from the past. But tonight Mordecai's lips brushed over his and forced the animal aside.

The boys had first kissed in the barn, hidden by shadows, with the rustling of birds overhead. They'd kissed and groped each other with fumbling teenage curiosity, sometimes for hours. It had been a secret. It had been safe. They'd spent the whole summer together, lying in the high stalks of wheat, other times in the barn again. Brick had loved the other boy, and it made him careless.

His momma's wedding ring had cut his lip clean in half, so deep that he'd needed stitches. He hadn't been allowed to leave the house for a long time. There were secrets. His secrets, his and his momma's.

A couple nights later there came a knock at the door, and his momma had shooed him out of the room, so he'd crouched in the hall, listening. It was the other boy's mother. She sounded frazzled, and when Brick's momma calmly suggested that boy hadn't come home because he was a filthy sinner, that devil must have got him, she'd fallen apart. She'd screamed that Brick's momma had done something, that she'd murdered her boy, she  _knew it_. She would  _prove it._

But she never did, and the boy never came home.  _He was only fourteen and he never came home. Because the devil got to pokin'..._

Brick was on Pandora now, millions of miles away from Menoetius, where his momma couldn't give him any more scars. But it wasn't his momma he was scared of, not really. Because the apple never falls from the tree.

"Brick!" Mordecai yelled. Brick could tell it wasn't the first time he'd tried to get his attention.

"Sorry," he said. "Just thinking."

"About what?" Mordecai asked. Brick shook his head. For a beat, the smaller man just looked at him with piercing green eyes, so alarmingly like the other boy's. Then he tried to kiss him again.

Brick pulled away, his hands jumping up to Mordecai's chest, holding him back.

A wounded expression crossed the other man's face, just for an instant. His eyes hardened and flashed in the firelight.

"Then talk to me," Mordecai demanded.

"I can't. I can't," Brick said. He couldn't meet those hard eyes.

"You can! Just say what you're thinking about, you  _panocha_ ,  _hije de puta._. Or say the other thing! I know that you want to. So say it! Say you love me!  _Decirlo_!"

Brick opened his mouth but nothing came out.  _He never came home to dinner,_ he wanted to scream.  _He was only fourteen!_ The silence sat heavy between them.

Mordecai slapped him across the face, hard. Brick's animal surged up and he yanked it back, more fiercely than he'd ever had to in his life. It was close, too close. The effort ripped the air from his lungs. Mordecai hung his head.

They didn't say anything else for awhile. Thunder cracked outside, breaking the silence. It startled the skag pup into a yelp.

"It's raining," Brick said.

"Guess so," Mordecai replied, uninterested. He made no move to climb off of the larger man's lap.

The air crackled with electricity, making the fine hairs on Brick's neck stand on end. Mordecai picked at something on Brick's shoulder, at some blemish or scar, scratching it with his ragged, bitten fingernails. His weight in Brick's lap felt good, and he realized, with a small sense of horror, that he'd gotten hard. He was about to awkwardly excuse himself when the smaller man shifted against him. Just a little, just enough to tell that he was hard too.

Mordecai sighed. "Do you wanna?" he asked, sounding embarrassed and a little pissed off.

Despite everything, Brick did.


	12. Bloom

The sound of slurping roused Brick from sleep. He blinked and groaned and struggled to sit up. His back ached from the night spent on cold, hard stone. He scanned the cave, and when his eyes fell on the skag, he gaped.

The pup had grown during the night.

Before, it had come up to Brick's knees, maybe an inch or so taller, but now it was easily three times that size. It crouched over the carcass of the crawworm Brick and Mordecai had slain the night before. They had abandoned the meal in the heat of their fight, and in the rushed passion that followed, but the skag had taken advantage of their waste. Brick could see that it had eaten every jiggly morsel out of the crawworm's shell, and presently polished off the greasy remnants.

Brick whistled to get the pup's attention, then wondered if that was a bad idea. It could have been another skag, after all, an interloper who snuck in during the storm. But it wasn't. At the sound of Brick's whistle, the pup—although it wasn't a pup, not anymore—looked up, spread its maw in a skaggy grin, and bounded over to him.

"Whoah! Hey, buddy," Brick said, laughing as the skag turned its prehensile tongue on his face, sliming him with spit and bits of crawworm.

The skag barked its own laugh-like chuff. Brick wrangled it to the ground, and it allowed itself to be pinned, wriggling happily in his grasp. The stony lumps that had previously pebbled the skag's soft, slightly saggy skin had grown overnight into full armor plates.

"You need a name."

The skag rolled onto its back and cocked its head in anticipation.

"How about...Frank?" Brick suggested the first name to pop into his mind.

Frank approved. He pounced on Brick's chest and knocked him backward, lathing his face in more slobbery kisses. Brick pushed the skag off him and wiped his face with the back of one arm. Frank did a doggy dance around him as he climbed to his feet.

The rain had stopped. Apart from the clacking of Frank's claws against stone, the cave was silent. Sunlight daggered through the crevice and revealed, but its glow, a thick haze of dust. Mordecai was gone, along with his guns and pack.

Brick wondered if the other man was still angry. They'd not spoken much after their quick tryst, in fact, had retired immediately to separate sleeping spots. But, at some point before that, Mordecai had called him sweet. He'd also called him other things, words which Brick knew to mean 'son of a bitch' and 'ox', but...

_Say you love me!_

Brick twirled the demand through mental fingers, feeling the implications of it, and found it just as delicious from all angles. He wished he'd obeyed that order. To hell with his animal, to hell with the apple and the goddamned tree. But it was too late now.

He ambled across the cavern, slinging his bandoleer over his shoulder as he went. When he reached the cave's mouth, he ducked through. He gasped. Sometime in the night, the desert had bloomed.

Sprays of purple and yellow grasses sprung from the sand, a plush carpet of living color, coming up as high as Brick's chest in some patches. Wildflowers starred the landscape. He thought he knew some of their names—lilting, lyrical names like slender goldenweed, sleepy catchfly, desert stars and bluedicks, brickelbush and plain's blackfoot—some of them made up by himself and his sister during their barefoot treks through the foothills. Of course these couldn't be the same flowers, but damn, did they ever  _look_ like them, enough to elicit a bright burst of nostalgia.

Frank exploded past him as he stood, transfixed, in the entrance, and beckoned with an exuberant bark. Brick followed his pet into the ocean of flora.

Man and skag ran together for awhile, intoxicated by the sweet smell of budding plants and by the sudden abundance of oxygen. Frank vanished into a thicket of high grass. When Brick drew closer, he leaped out and knocked the man flat, wuffing and butting him with his armored skull. Brick fought him off and rolled to his feet. Mad laughter tore out of him as he resumed the chase.

They splashed through low pools where rain had gathered, stamping flat the succulent plants that clustered around the water. Already, the sun began to wither the transformed landscape. Grasses laid limp, the heads of flowers drooped on their stalks.

Brick barely noticed the signs of Pandora taking back its wastes. He was bursting with happiness, overfull of love for his galumphing, chuffing pet. For once, Brick and his animal were the same. They chased Frank together, a single soul, with one wild heart and empty head.

Finally, Frank stopped. He investigated a small oasis and lapped at the clear, clean water, wading up to his chest. Brick hauled himself up onto a jut of rock to sit and catch his breath.

As soon as he caught it, he lost it. Mordecai stood in the distance. His lanky body cut an unmistakable figure against the clear blue sky. He'd been on the other side of the rocky outcropping, hidden from view, and he and Brick caught sight of each other at the same time. Brick dropped over the side of the rocks and landed in the grass with a soft 'oomph'.

Mordecai started toward him, walking at first, then picking up speed until he was running, and Brick realized that he was running, too, both of them racing to close the distance. But when they reached each other, they stopped short, as though a pane of glass had sprung up between them. Mordecai's dreads were drawn into a loose, sloppy ponytail at the base of his neck, his goggles pushed up to his hairline, his clothes askew, as though he'd been sucked into the Commons by the same animal instinct that had come over Brick.

"Hey."

"Hey," Brick echoed.

"How about all this?" Mordecai said, gesturing around. "This...you know..."

Without waiting for him to finish, Brick swept the other man into his arms. One huge hand slipped to the small of Mordecai's back while the other came up to tangle in his dreads, to tug and tip his head back, to turn his face upward. The shorter man gaped wonderingly at Brick, and didn't seen at all surprised when he bent to kiss him.

Mordecai more than allowed the gesture; he welcomed it, opening his mouth to meet Brick's. His arms snaked up to wrap around the taller man's neck, pulling him down, holding him there. When Brick tried to straighten up, he was unable to extricate himself from that fierce embrace. Instead, he lifted the shorter man up, hands jumping to his butt to support the weight, but he miscalculated.

He lurched back, slipped, and fell. Mordecai laughed against his lips as they collapsed into the grass together.

"What were you tryin' to say?" Brick asked.

"I don't remember."

Brick laid back with Mordecai sprawled against his chest, pressing out a hollow in the field. The stalks of grass striped shadows over both of them. Mordecai's restless hands drifted up to trace scars at Brick's neck.

"I want to kiss you," he said.

Brick chuckled. "Go ahead."

Mordecai rolled his eyes. "Not right now,  _baboso._ I mean, I want to kiss you whenever I want."

"Oh. Well...okay."

"Yeah?"

"I said its okay," Brick said. He wound his fingers around Mordecai's beard and dragged him back into another press of lips.

Reclining in the grass, they shared a long, exploratory kiss, hands roving over each other's bodies. Brick couldn't help but think of Emmett again, and how they'd kissed in a different field. Before, in the claustrophobia of the cave, that memory had breathed down his neck, as close as Mordecai was to him now. But today, with the bounty of oxygen filling his lungs, and the strangely wonderful itch of Mordecai's beard against his skin, Emmett and the rotten cellar felt mercifully far away.

They only stopped kissing when a third tongue attempted to join theirs.

"What the fuck!" Mordecai yelped, and reached for the gun holstered at his hip.

Brick grabbed his arm with one hand and shooed the skag away with the other. "It's okay! It's just Frank."

"Who the hell is Frank?"

Mordecai scrambled up off of Brick, and Frank bounded away, looking back over his shoulder to see if anyone was chasing him. Brick got to his feet and hauled Mordecai up after him.

"The skag pup. I named him."

"There's no way that's the same skag." Mordecai squinted at the rollicking skag. "Is it? Damn, those things grow  _fast_."

Frank spotted something in the distance and went rigid. A quick, low chuffing sound guttered from his throat. Brick had to squint into the sun to make out what he was staring at. Two shapes, one large and one small, lumbered across the horizon...rakk hives. A flock of rakks spiraled in their wake, twisting and tumbling in perfect formation. Their flight made Brick dizzy.

For a moment, he was back in the painting. The world reeled around him.

Mordecai's arm crept around his waist, fingers slipping into his pocket. The gesture dragged Brick back to reality. He planted a grateful kiss on the top of Mordecai's head.

For awhile, they didn't speak, only leaned against each other and watched the slow approach of the rakk hives.

The hives strolled over up within a dozen yards. Brick was struck again by their bizarre appearance- the gnarled, stumpy legs like tree trunks, the mottled umber flesh that cooled to charcoal underneath. The smaller one was much lighter, almost pink, and completely hairless, while the larger had sprouted a crop of course dark hair at its throat and over its humped back. Brick had seen a few hives before, but all besides one had been dormant, half-buried in the earth.

Rakks came and went through the sore-like protrusions on their backs. The hives paid no mind, only honked joyfully to each other and stamped their massive feet. The smaller—most likely the offspring of the other—danced circles around its cumbersome mother, getting underfoot, chasing up rakks who tried to land in the grass. The mother made a noise halfway between a sigh and a fart. With their faces that resembled a certain part of female anatomy, the sigh sounded just like a queef.

Mordecai doubled over laughing. The young hive noticed him, peering in his direction with all four bulbous eyes. Its fleshy lips flapped obscenely as it honked a greeting.

"It likes you," Brick teased. "It wants you to pet it."

"Hell no! I think that's illegal."

Brick chuckled. Mordecai pulled away, leaving Brick to lament the loss of his weight against his side.

"We really should look for Lil and Roland," Mordecai said.

In the mad joy of finding the world changed, Brick had forgotten that he and Mordecai hadn't come out to the Commons alone. He'd forgotten everything: the mission, the Lawbringer, the sandstorm that separated the friends, all of it. Now it came crashing back to him.

"Oh, fuck. I hope they're okay. I'm a huge dick."

Mordecai looked up at him from under a raised eyebrow. "What's that? Bragging about your dick? I mean, it's nice, but I wouldn't say huge."

"No! I said I  _am_  a dick! 'cos-"

Mordecai elbowed him. "I know. I'm just messing with you."

Brick shoved him and he shoved back, grinning and grappling, until they were interrupted by a shriek. The source of the sound streaked across the sky- a dark shape with the cape of fire. It came out of nowhere, rocketing past at breakneck speeds, a trail of greasy blue smoke billowing behind it. The two men stopped to watch its arc and saw it disappear over a dune with a tremendous crunch.

"A loader?" Brick wondered aloud.

"Maybe it's damaged."

As if to confirm his speculation, the ghost of a hologram appeared just over the horizon, barely visible against the sky. Frank had also seen the loader's doomed trajectory, and he tore off after the pillar of smoke.

"Shit," Brick lamented, and started after his pet, calling for him. "Frank! Damnit, Frank, wait for-"

But when he crested the hill, he fell silent.

Either Peterson's information had been wrong (which wouldn't be surprising; he'd lost a lot of blood) or Hyperion had been busting their ass over the past few days.

An entire base had sprung up in the westernmost part of Rust Commons. It boiled out of the ground like a glossy yellow and white tumor, seething with activity. Brick saw legions of loaders, some larger machines, and a few scattered people standing about. He could tell which distant blobs were human because they stood oriented away from the rest, as transfixed by the landscape as he had been.

Nearby, the damaged loader smoked and sparked and sputtered fitfully. A surveyor buzzed toward it with alarming speed.

Brick looked around but found nowhere to hide. Frank threatened the noisome loader with a volley of barks. He scratched the ground with one paw, like a bull preparing to charge.

"Leave it, Frank."

The drone was upon them now. Its energy tether lashed out and connected to the faulty loader to take a diagnostic. Once secure, it turned its optical sensor to Brick. He realized, too late, that he should have shot it, and even now it might be transmitting a video feed to the base.

The surveyor exploded in a spray of shrapnel. The largest chunk spun toward the ground, where it collided with the injured loader. The hologram blinked out. Brick looked over his shoulder to see Mordecai standing at the base of the hill behind him, his Orion sniper rifle resting on his shoulder. Brick flashed him a thumbs up, which he returned before striding up the hill.

"Whoah! Get down," he said, pulling Brick into the grass. Frank crouched beside them.

Brick suddenly remembered something, and he shook Mordecai's shoulder to get his attention. "Mordy. Did you grab the my gun?"

"...Huh?"

"My Draco. It was all in pieces, an' I forgot to check if it was in the cave."

"Oh. I left it," Mordecai said, peering over the stalks to study the Hyperion compound. "There were too many parts to carry."

"What? But..."

"I'll get it later and put it back together for you. I promise." Mordecai's eyes remained fixed on the base downhill, but his pinky finger searched for Brick's and found it, twisting the two digits together.

"Well...okay. But you better not forget."

Mordecai elbowed him. "Shh. Look over there."

Brick pulled himself into a sitting position, hunched over to keep hidden from view. He tried to see what Mordecai pointed at.

"Too far," he said.

Mordecai sighed and shoved the Orion into Brick's hands. "Geez. You've got to get your eyes checked, babe."

Brick didn't argue, but raised the scope to his eye and peered through. It took him awhile to adjust to the tight field of vision and find what Mordecai was talking about, but he knew right away when he saw it.

"Is that what I think it is?" Mordecai asked.

Two Hyperion agents stood on a concrete walkway. They appeared to be arguing. One of them held a familiar chunk of metal, and the other seemed to order him to hand it over. The first said something and held the object out of reach, tossing it casually in one hand.

His fingers accidentally depressed a button. The machine sprang into existence in a flurry of sliding parts. Brick was too far off to hear it, but he knew that it would be clicking, clacking, calibrating, locking into targets, and then it would-

The agents scrambled away as Roland's turret opened fire, high caliber rounds slamming into their shields, sending ripples of white hexagons across their bodies. One of the mens' shield crapped out before he could reach cover. The next shot knocked him forward on his face, and subsequent rounds turned him into a red smear.

The largest loader Brick had ever seen appeared over a building. Four canons jutted from its shoulders, and its arms ended in chain guns. A volley of homing rockets burst from its shoulder cannons. When the dust cleared, only scraps remained where the turret had stood. Brick lowered the rifle.

"They got Roland," he announced, a little too loud.

"Maybe he's being held for questioning," Mordecai said, gesturing toward the Hyperion hive which marred the landscape. "Somewhere in there."


	13. Yellow and White

The Hyperion compound sprawled endlessly in every direction, all fresh plaster and the dizzying fumes of newly molded plastics, everything yellow and white. Around each corner lurked loaders and Hyperion employees, to be quietly dispatched by the two intruders. Brick did just that- snapped the neck of an architect from behind, without being spotted. The dead man fell to the ground. Brick kicked him behind an alcove to avoid the suspicion of passerbys.

"Poor fuck," Brick mused. "Prob'ly just thinkin' about what to have for lunch, everyday shit, then, bam. He's dead."

"Come on,  _amigo_ , don't think of it like that. If they haven't figured out what Hyperion's up to by now, that's on them."

"You mean like Amanda?"

"The Lawbringer. Not Amanda."

Brick acknowledged that with a noncommittal grunt.

When they'd first slunk into the base, low and silent as shadows- or one shadow, and one mountain of muscle doing his best to crouch- Brick had been eager, almost excited. But that had been an hour ago, and they seemed no closer to finding their friends. His enthusiasm waned. He didn't like murdering folks, not like this, with their backs turned and their guards down, with the light of realization dawning and dying in their eyes. It made Brick feel ill. Made him want to pray.

From somewhere behind them came the hydraulic clunk of a loader's steps. They looked, but wherever the thing was, it remained out of sight. The sound faded with each footfall until Brick could no longer hear it. He breathed out.

Mordecai snarled. "I don't understand how this fucking place is laid out. Roland would know, if he were here. He could be anywhere. Another base, underground...he could be on the Goddamned moon, for all I know," he growled, followed by an impressive slew of Spanish curses.

Brick covered Frank's ears. Mordecai gave him a long, dark look. Finally, his lips twitched, and curled into a small smile.

" _Baboso_ ," he said.

Brick didn't know what that word meant, but Mordecai said it often, and to him exclusively. He got the feeling that it technically meant something nasty, but it didn't feel the same as the names Brick had been called as a kid. Those names had hurt, and still tasted like bile when he tried to utter them aloud.

But in the unique language of his and Mordecai's relationship,  _baboso_  meant something affectionate. Something like- 'I can't look at you without smiling'.

"Frank's still kind of a baby. You gotta watch your language."

"You nag! I've heard you curse a thousand times."

"But not the-"

"Not the G-word, I know. I know. But listen. We need to focus, and rethink our strategy. We're not getting anywhere. You got any ideas?"

Brick blinked. "Me?"

"Sure. Your guess is as good as mine."

Brick had no ideas, and was surprised that Mordecai would even bother to ask him. He was about to say so, when, like an answer to their prayers, a distant scream split the silence.

"Did you hear that?" Brick asked.

Mordecai held a finger to his lips. Frank stood very still, staring off to the right, presumably toward the source of the sound. The scream had been short and shocking, and now Brick heard another voice. An angry woman's voice.

"Lil," he breathed.

Frank trotted off and turned down another walkway, padding purposefully, and Brick and Mordecai hurried after him. The skag led them around a corner. They found themselves standing on a small platform which overlooked an enormous pit.

The compound had been built halfway around the hole, so Brick could see the rapidly wilting greenery of Rust Commons on the other side, and knew that they'd traveled all the way through the facility. The pit beveled downward in sections like enormous stairs, and a word for the stairs floated into Brick's mind without origin or explanation-  _benches._  Massive vehicles parked on nearly every bench, down and down, until they looked like toys on the furthest levels. The perimeter had been carved into a uniform shape. It looked like-

"It's a quarry," Mordecai said. "A pit mine."

The equipment below scraped at the earth, prodded and ripped it away, carried it upward to some unseen dumping ground, and Brick was absurdly reminded of Zed's nanites working through a human body. No vegetation grew on the benches. Something else moved in the pit below, something that looked like a centipede. As he squinted, Mordecai unstrapped the Orion and put it in Brick's hands, and said, "Just for a second. I think I'll need it."

Brick looked through the scope and waited for his eyes to adjust. When he found the centipede again, it had become a chain-gang of strange, hunched beings, with inscrutable dark eyes and noses like elephant trunks.  _Not faces, though_. Each of the creatures wore a gas mask, presumably for the mines. A band of energy attached to an ankle cuff bound each creature to the one ahead of it. The procession wound its way downward with a pair of Hyperion soldiers close behind, and soon it disappeared, snakelike, into one of the dark shafts around the pit.

Brick scanned the area for Roland and Lilith, but couldn't find them. He began to wonder if they'd gotten mixed up, but then he looked straight down, and saw them, just one bench under himself and Mordecai, so close that he might have pegged them with a kicked pebble. Brick handed back the sniper rifle. The smaller man had already spotted their friends in the pit. They studied the scene.

Two huge loaders like the one they saw earlier loomed over Roland and Lilith, one each. The captives hung a few inches off the ground, tethered to the loader's canons by fizzing yellow cords of energy. A large metal collar had been clamped around Lilith's neck. A short distance away stood two Hyperion officials, oriented with their backs to Brick, talking to each other. The taller of the pair was more obviously a Hyperion pawn, with cybernetic enhancements sporting the company's color scheme. The smaller figure could have been confused for a civilian if she hadn't been conspiring with the other.

The smaller person, probably the woman Peterson warned them about-  _the Lawbringer,_ Brick thought, with his pulse jack-hammering in his ears- seemed restless, her hands fluttering near her hips, ghosting over the twin pistols holstered there. The cyborg explained something to her, and her fingers twitched. Brick wished he could hear them.

An enormous machine towered over all of them, so wide that it nearly didn't fit on the bench, with the furthest of its three legs resting perilously close to the edge. It squatted like a monstrous toad and watched over the captives with a glowing red eye. Periodically the eye would flick about, drawing holograms in the air, which would then resolve themselves into loaders of various sizes and models.  _A digistruct module,_ Brick thought. A constructor. It was the largest he'd ever seen. The deployed loaders left as quickly as they were built.

Brick started to heft himself over the guardrail but Mordecai pulled him back by his belt. "Are you crazy?" he hissed. "Two Hyperion commanders, two bad-mother loaders, and that... THING, making more of them? What do you think our chances are?"

"We can't just stand here! You heard-"

"I know! I'm working on it." Mordecai glared over the rail, his hands worrying over his sniper rifle. "That light might be a critical point, like on the loaders."

"You're gonna snipe it?"

"Unless you have another idea."

"Just to pound the crap out of 'em," Brick said, sounding uncertain. He kept on eye on the Lawbringer, waiting breathlessly for her to turn around. When she finally turned back to Roland and Lilith, her face was hidden under the brim of her hat. She strode over and stopped within a few feet of their suspended forms, then suddenly recoiled, and her arm jerking up to wipe her cheek. Brick couldn't be sure, but he thought Lilith had spit on her.

The Lawbringer whipped one of her pistols from its holster and jammed it against Lilith's jaw. The half man, half loader Commander stepped forward to put a hand on her shoulder, but she ignored him. Lilith struggled against the bindings.

"Very funny, bandit," The Lawbringer's voice rose above the clatter of activity, as though she knew Brick was listening and spoke for his benefit. "I wonder if your boyfriend appreciates your sense of humor?"

She looked over her shoulder at the other commander. He hesitated, then locked gazes with the loader who held Roland. A red pulse flashed from his cybernetic eye. The energy tethers sparked and glowed white hot, and Roland jerked, electricity crackling over his skin, and he screamed again. Brick nearly hurled himself over the embankment anyway, balls to his chances.

Mordecai touched his clenched fist.

"You can't," he said.

"Then do something!" Brick demanded.

The energy bonds returned to their usual yellow color, and Roland went slack. His head lolled to the side. Brick nearly panicked, until he saw the man's chest rise with a sudden sharp breath. A woman's laugh rang like a bell and at first Brick thought it was the Lawbringer gloating, but no, the laugh was Lilith's, bursting crazily from her mouth. The frustrated Hyperion officer ground the barrel of the revolver harder into her jaw.

"I already told you, you won't get a motherfucking syllable out of us. You might as well pull the trigger," Lilith spat. "He- we'd  _both_  die before we tell you anything."

The Lawbringer brought the pistol down to her side, but didn't holster it. "We'll see. Wilhelm, get the other thing."

"I'm not your purse," grumbled the other commander, apparently Wilhelm, his deep voice distorted by mechanization. He reached for something on the ground that Brick hadn't noticed before, a basketball sized orb, plain except for an inlaid control console, and pressed some buttons on the interface. He grabbed either end of the orb and twisted. Purple smoke poured from the object as it split down the middle. The Lawbringer coughed and waved her free hand across her face.

"Away from me, please," she said, with no asking in her voice.

Wilhelm made an obscene gesture behind her back and held the silver orb further away. He extracted something from it, a vial, purple like the smoke. Also like the spires in the cave. Brick glanced at Mordecai, and couldn't tell if he'd even noticed the vial, the way he sat rigid behind the scope of his rifle, lining up his shot.

"Since you don't seem to care about your boyfriend, maybe you'll be more interested in self preservation. Vermin usually are," The Lawbringer said as she took the vial from Wilhelm, and Brick realized that it wasn't a vial, but a syringe. She held it up to Lilith's neck, like she had with the revolver before. Lilith sneered.

"Alright, I'll talk," she confided, scarcely loud enough for Brick to hear her. "...about what a filthy slut you are."

Almost instantaneously, the Hyperion woman jammed the syringe into Lilith's neck and depressed the plunger, sending the whole vial of purple gunk into her body. The cyborg commander jolted, seemed surprised, like that hadn't been part of the plan.

Lilith screamed. Roland's eyes slammed open and he lunged, hard, against his tethers, but they held fast.

A lot of things happened at once, some that Brick wouldn't fully understand until later.

First came the crack of thunder, and the hot blue impact as the Orion's bullet struck the Hyperion woman's energy shield. Mordecai fired again. The Lawbringer drew her pistols and pulled the triggers in one impossibly fast movement, so the bullet caught Mordecai's second round and shattered it, sending static ripples zig-zagging through the air.

The hulking digistruct module raised its eye to where Brick and Mordecai stood. It made a sound like a thousand trucks grinding gears, so low and menacing that the platform rattled under their feet and Brick's stomach wobbled nauseatingly. The eye blinked. When it opened again, it wielded a sword of red light- a laser, Brick would realize later- that flashed high and fell on Mordecai, phasing through his energy shield.

His shield's physical emitter exploded in a spray of glass when the light fell on it. The beam cut so neatly through his shoulder on its way down that at first it seemed to have passed harmlessly through him, except for his pained squawk, and the way he staggered back. The beam completed its arc from his shoulder to armpit. The red light flared out, energy spent. Mordecai's arm, severed, fell onto the platform, and Brick howled as though it were his own.

 

 


	14. Out of the Blue

Mordecai slumped against the wall, clutching his bleeding stump. They had staggered back to the walkway they'd emerged from, Brick fluttering over Mordecai, loud and useless and terrified, until the injured man had shoved him away. His bloody palm had slipped weakly over Brick's chest.

"Get my arm," he demanded.

Brick hurried back to get it. When he picked it up, the skin was still warm, and for a horrible moment he thought he would throw up. Somehow he made it back to Mordecai without vomiting.

Surveyor drones flocked from the area to peer over the balustrade at the intruders, flashing for loader assistants, sapping Brick's shield with their beams. Brick positioned himself between them and Mordecai. The wounded man had no shield to be sapped- just bare, bleeding flesh.

"What do I do with it?" Brick asked.

"Put it back on. There's a kit on my belt."

"You're joking!"

"Sorry... I can't do it myself, so it's gotta be you...  _Te Necesito_ , babe."

Brick almost said he couldn't, but Mordecai would have done it for him. He unclasped the medical kit from Mordecai's belt with fumbling fingers, and pulled the pack's zipper down with his teeth, still holding the arm in his other hand.  _A Goddamn arm!_  The absurdity made him laugh aloud, though it came out as a sob.

Bullets whizzed off his shield as loaders swarmed the mouth of the walkway. The pair was protected on one side by a wall and semi-blocked on the other by a piece of digging equipment, but open from the pit. Loaders crowded through, only a few yards from where Brick shielded Mordecai with his body.

"One sec," Brick said. He dropped the arm.

"Careful... with that..." Mordecai said. His face had grown pale, the shadows under his eyes impossibly cavernous. Brick reached down to his hip and flicked the button on his energy shield to deactivate it, unhooked it, and clasped it onto Mordecai's belt where he'd taken the kit from. It powered up with a shrill bleep, casting a web of fractals over its new owner's body, briefly visible in the shadows.

"Don't..."

"Shut it, Mordy," Brick said. "I'll be fine." Though he flinched, waiting for the loaders to tear him apart. Nothing happened. He craned around to find out why.

Frank had shoved past the loaders and stood in the hallway, blocking the path with his large form, head lowered, shoulders hunched. Bullets ricocheted off his plates.

Brick took a grenade from his bandolier, pulled the pin, and chucked it over the skag. Too late, he remembered that he'd bought a new modification which he knew nothing about. The grenade disappeared into the crowd of enemies.

 _WHOOOMPH._ Thegrenade went immediately, a fuse time of zilch. A whirlwind of flames jetted out from between the loaders. Their metal shells glowed in the heat as they stumbled out of the way. Frank lunged into the thick of them, right into the fire, and Brick yelled for him to stop, to stay. He lost sight of the skag between the loaders.

A massive paw came thundering down on one of the red-hot enemies.

Its shell crumpled. Frank emerged from the smoke, maw open in a triumphant roar, a mane of flames licking across his chest and shoulders. One by one, he lashed out at the loaders, tearing through their weakened exoskeletons, slamming them against the wall. Brick watched, mesmerised.

A volley of mad laughter drifted from the direction of the pit, and Brick could swear he heard the familiar rumble of a Bandit Technical truck.

"Are you... forgetting... something?" Mordecai wheezed. Brick turned and found his friend holding his own arm.

"Fuck, I'm a shit! Fuck!"  _That's nearly a buck in the swear jar_ , Brick thought, insanely, as he rummaged through the kit. He retrieved the small tube of salve and squeezed the entire contents into his palm. Mordecai held out the disembodied arm expectantly _._ "Oh God." There's the dollar.

With his eyes shut, trying desperately not to think about it, he slathered the bloody stump with the nanite infused formula.

Behind him, Frank roared, different this time. A pained sound. Brick fought the urge to look. He took the arm and pressed it to the stump, thankfully remembering to align the hand the right way. It would have been hard to explain if he'd stuck it on backwards.

 _Take care of business, in a flash,_  Brick thought, falling back on his old mantra, while he grabbed more supplies from the pack. He managed to thread the surgical thread through a needle's eye on his third try, and pulled it taut. With a deep breath, he plunged the needle into Mordecai's flesh. The wounded man barely seemed to notice. His flesh was pallid under Brick's fingers.

He worked the needle in and out, quick as he could.

The stitches turned out large and sloppy, but sturdy, and he knotted the end tightly. He nipped off the rest of the thread with his teeth.

"Will it heal?" Brick asked. A bullet cut a slice out of his bicep, and another whizzed past his ear, close enough to feel the heat of it.

"Yeah... It's fine... Go to Lil." Mordecai said, trying to shove Brick away with a frightfully weak hand. "Go."

Brick almost told him to shut up again, but didn't. Bloodwing perched on the banister nearby. Brick turned to her now. "Protect him," he said.

The bird didn't reply, of course, but he knew that she would defend Mordecai with her life, if it came to that. Brick lifted Mordecai's hand and kissed the center of his palm.

The injured man smiled. "You... remember that?" he asked, his voice faint.

"All the time." Brick lowered his hand and stepped away. He studied Mordecai's pale, slumped form, and almost stayed, but an unfamiliar scream wavered out of the pit- a feminine scream. He thought of Amanda.

"Be okay," he said to Mordecai, and jogged off down the walkway, stepping around the spitting, sparking remains of loaders. Frank waited on the platform, staring down into the pit, with blood smeared across his sides and flanks. Brick touched him and he flinched. "It's okay. It's me." Frank regarded him for a moment, and then, as though he'd been waiting for Brick to catch up, sprang over the edge.

Brick wished he'd have waited long enough for him to survey the pit. He plunged after Frank, sliding too fast down the steep embankment, and grabbed the skag's back. With his claws dug into the dirt, Frank slowed his descent enough that he didn't splat on impact with the first bench.

As soon as he reached the ground, a young man stumbled into him, sobbing. His red Raider's beret lay somewhere out in the battlefield. Brick hadn't expected to see him, so he didn't recognize the man at first.

Frank tore off after something in the distance.

"Help me," the man pleaded, and Brick realized it was Andy.

A GUN loader closed in on them, brandishing dual assault rifles. Brick reached over his shoulder for his Matador, found the shotgun with steady fingers, and raised it. But when he fired, the scatter of pellets barely dented the oncoming loader.

Andy clung to Brick's arm, babbling, and he shoved the younger man away.

The loader stopped. Luminescent acid spread across its hull, back to front. Brick recognized it as Electra's handiwork. Encouraged, he squeezed another round into the loader. This time the scattershot cleaved easily through the metal, and the loader collapsed in two pieces.

Lilith stood a ways back, frothing SMG still raised. Something was wrong. She seemed full of purple fire, glowing through her eyes and parted lips, and even from her nostrils. Her tattoos had become shifting, shining coils.

"Where's Mordecai?" she asked.

"He's... he's fine," Brick replied, gawping.

Andy sobbed back against his side, and Brick shoved him away again.

"Put yourself together, kid. Take this," he said, and shoved the shotgun into the young man's arms.

"It didn't work too well," Andy replied sullenly.

"Better than nothing. How the hell'd you get here, anyway?" Brick asked.

Lilith loped off toward Roland, who was bookended by two loaders and struggling to keep his ground. The hunched, toad-like constructor uttered a mechanical belch, and birthed a trio of fresh loaders.

"Bool," Andy replied, barely audible over the constructor's roar.

Brick thought he'd misheard. "Huh?"

"I brought 'im!" someone boomed, and it was Bool, after all, seemingly out of the blue. Brick jumped.

Bool clapped a hand over his shoulder. "Sorry to spook ya. Had one of my feelings, one of them little intuitions, that you all got into the bad shite. So I went out driving. My gut took me to your town, and I found this lad."

"You mean Andy?" Brick said, scanning the pit. The sun rode high in the sky, illuminating the battle with the overblown clarity of a fever dream. The cyborg commander, Wilhelm, perched atop the massive constructor, orbited by a small drone. It beamed an additional energy shield around him. Nearby, Frank grappled with a larger drone. He stood on his back legs, claws dug into its shell, driving it back. He looked for the Lawbringer, but couldn't find her.

"Yep. Andy brought me here," Bool explained.

That was the craziest explanation Brick had ever heard. It had to be a lie, or missing loads of information, but he didn't argue.

The largest of the three loaders dispatched by the constructor lumbered toward him, one whose arms ended in miniguns. They whirred and unleashed a hail of automatic gunfire.

Brick strafed out of the way, just in time. He had no shield. He drew Priscilla from her holster at his hip, but didn't fire- rather, he ducked and dodged, keeping just ahead of the gunfire. Bullets obliterated the dirt around his feet.  _One wrong move..._

"I got this 'n," said Bool, hefting his own shotgun- Maliwan make, judging by its slick design, and by the clunk-hiss of compression when he pulled the trigger- the elemental accessory at work. His round hit the loader dead in the chest. A seed of acid bloomed and dissolved a hole in the loader's shell, leaving its insides exposed. Pistons pumped in the dark cavity. Bool squeezed the trigger again. His shot found some vital mechanism, and the loader dropped.

Another took its place. Brick fired on this one, but both of Priscilla's chambered rounds glanced harmlessly off the its exterior.

"This sucks! I miss when all we fought was bandits and Lance, so I could just pummel 'em to a pulp," Brick complained, before he remembered that Bool had been both. "Uh. No offense."

"None taken," Bool replied. If he sounded aggravated, it was probably just because the loader closed in quickly while he fumbled more shells into his shotgun.

Brick rammed the Hyperion mech with his shoulder, knocking it off-center. It gave Bool enough time to finish reloading. His next shot hit the mech's optic sensor, and it exploded in an alarming spray of sparks that sent Brick scuttling away. It folded to its knees.

"We gotta get out of here!" Lilith yelled. She strafed around two more loaders, peppering them with Electra's corrosion-shock rounds. "They just keep coming."

"But-" Brick said. His eyes darted across the pit, searching for the Lawbringer.

Instead, he saw the massive constructor's eye close.

It groaned, so loud that the bench shook, and sent everyone besides the the largest loaders and Wilhlem- safe atop the machine- staggering and sprawling. One of the mega-loaders whittled away the last of Roland's shield. It released a rain of embers with its diffusion.

The constructor's eye opened, and it brandished a sword of red light. Another laser.

It swung down toward Roland, but before it could carve through him, it changed course, swinging up and away.

Brick blinked, confused. A purple halo of light now shrouded the constructor. Somehow, the massive mech had shifted, almost imperceptibly. Just enough that its third tripod now rested on thin air. It toppled backward, directing its hard-boiled toward the sky.

It slid, slowly, like a sun setting over the precipice, and disappeared behind a cloud of dust. Then completely, down the slope, taking Wilhelm with it. The laser swooped like a spotlight. The constructor groaned its earth-rattling cry all the way down, and hit the bench below with a seismic crunch.

Lilith collapsed to her knees. It might have been Brick's imagination, but her tattoos seemed dimmer.

"Boy! Yer' skag!" Bool hollered.

Brick had been hypnotized by the sight of the avalanching constructor, but now he looked around. He found that Frank had galumphed off after something else.

Slowly, though. Limping. Blood spattered the ground behind him.

"Frank!" Brick called, lurching toward the wounded skag. Frank continued to limp toward the object of his attention. Brick followed his gaze. The unmistakable silhouette of the Lawbringer stood in the distance- and yes, whether or not she was Amanda, she surely modeled her appearance after the heroine of that ancient, beloved western- far enough away that Brick couldn't make out her features. The revolver in her outstretched hand kicked, catching the sun briefly.

Frank's head jerked to the side. Blood splashed the sand.

An image lanced through Brick: the fire bitch. He'd pierced through her muzzle in the same way. He shook the thought, caught up to Frank, and threw himself over the wounded skag.

The Lawbringer held her revolver steady, aimed, and although Brick couldn't see, he knew her finger would be closing around the trigger. Too late for anything else, he waited.

Suddenly, the revolver snapped out of her hand. It skittered away and came to rest in the dust. She whipped around, searching for the assailant.

Brick looked too. On a hunch, his eyes drifted to the platform where he'd left Mordecai.

He found his sharpshooting friend leaning over the railing, his expression unreadable at such a distance, but Brick could guess. Pleased, proud. A pistol smoked in his hand. That shot must have rivaled the one which earned him first place in the sharpshooting competition twenty years prior, the disputed win that made him leave his home-world.

It the midst of the chaos, Brick was impressed.

Disarmed, the Lawbringer sprang into action. She loped toward the bench's edge on long, lean legs, and Brick jagged forward to try to catch her, but he was too far behind. The Hyperion commander neared the precipice. If Brick couldn't reach her, she would escape into the confusion below.

A ball of white-purple light exploded into existence- Lilith leaving phasewalk- and blocked the Lawbringer from the edge. The Hyperion woman turned tail and sprinted back toward the pit's curved perimeter.

Brick had her. There was nowhere else to go. He didn't notice the mine entrance until the Lawbringer disappeared inside, ducking under the bands of yellow tape. The tape declared, Caution! Do not enter! and Brick reached it a few moments later, at the same time as Lilith.

The shaft's cool breath washed over him. He looked into that perfect blackness, terror welling in his chest, his animal shifting, sliding, ready to defend him.

But Brick didn't need defending. He needed-

Lilith shoved something into his slack, sweaty hands, and he barely managed to grasp it. He focused on the object. The gun fit snugly in his grip, shining in the sunlight like a glossy blue beetle, cool to the touch, though the plastic gauge showed it to be full of fire. Pyra.

Brick looked up at Lilith. She glanced behind them, where Bool, Andy and Roland closed in, then back at Brick, and nodded curtly.  _Go get her,_ her eyes said.  _Before they do._

Brick returned the nod. He turned, heart battering his ribcage, and ducked into the darkness.


	15. Below

The tunnel started out wide but quickly narrowed. Brick shouldered his way through spaces too small for him, wondering why construction had been halted. Dangerous fumes? Structural instability? Both thoughts appalled him, and he tried to put them out of his head.

The smell of what he always assumed to be worms filled his nose. Sour guts. The scent of dank, underground places. It took all of his willpower to press on into the darkness.

He finally remembered Pyra, aimed, and pulled the trigger. Fire spurted down the length of the tunnel, revealing a gentle downward curve by its flickering light. Just at the limit of the flames, Brick could see the female shape scrambling through the darkness. Something glinted in her hand.

 _Another pistol,_ Brick remembered, just as the gunshot cracked through the tunnel, echoing in the enclosed space.

Pain ripped into his left calf. The bullet missed the bone and passed all the way through his leg, so it hurt like hell, but didn't cripple him. He fired Pyra again, but the jet of flames barely reached the receding figure. Where it did, the fire only licked over the fractals of her energy shield.

She shot back at him from the hip, unable to miss in such tight quarters. The bullet stung his left thumb- a glancing blow, but close. Too close. Brick put on a burst of speed and squeezed the trigger.

The flames illuminated... nothing. Blackness.

Brick tried to stop, too late. He pitched down and down, and for a moment he was rolling down the cellar stairs, listening to the bird king wicker in the darkness.

But then he landed on the hard ground with a terrific whumph. The impact clocked him back into focus. He scrambled up, blinking around at the cavern he'd tumbled into.

If the quarry had been a fever dream, this was its dirty, bedraggled underbelly- a nightmarish chamber that Brick couldn't gauge the size of. The walls and floor splintered into spires of purple ore. If he'd fallen a foot to the right, he would have been impaled by one of the crystals. They pulsed with a repugnant dark light, sending their own distended shadows arcing across the walls. Brick wondered if Hyperion was mining for this substance.

He saw the Lawbringer. She'd gotten up and staggered to the other end of the chamber, but there were no paths leading away, nowhere to escape this time. She'd lost her revolver.

He spotted the gun without really looking for it, half hidden under a crystal formation. Her eyes flicked down. She lunged.

They reached the pistol at the same time, arms outstretched, but his fingers closed around it first. He raised it triumphantly and grabbed her collar in his other hand. The Lawbringer yowled as he hauled her up.

Brick looked her over, heart in his throat. He still longed to see Amanda's face. Whatever she'd done, he could forgive her. God could forgive her.

But instead, he found what he should have seen all along: Her skin was a shade too pale to be Amanda's, and her hair, while dark, lacked his sister's lazy, swooping curls. The Lawbringer glared at Brick with amber eyes, but not Amanda's. Those twin fires had always burned so hot that, on the rare occasions when Brick earned his sister's scorn, they'd seemed to burn him.

A welt of disappointment boiled in his throat.

Brick dropped the pistol, which clattered to the ground. His empty hand rose rose, unbidden, like a snake-charmer's cobra, and rested uncertainly against the Lawbringer's neck.

He hadn't known he was going to strangle the woman until he started doing it. But that was fine. He wanted to kill her. For torturing his friends, for her complicity in Hyperion's crimes, but mostly for not being Amanda.

"Not afraid to d-die... a woman standing..." she gurgled. Her eyes fixed on his, strangely placid. "But not... a dog..."

"Not like a dog in the street," Brick snarled back, pressing his thumbs harder against her windpipe, stifling the familiar quote before she could utter the rest of it. The Lawbringer's final line from the movie. So what if she believed herself to be the hero, and him a murderous bandit? She deserved to die. He deserved to kill her.

And did it matter? He was stronger.

 _Brick the brawler, Brick the strong,_  whispered a voice in his head. A chorus of voices, jeering, but somehow kind, too. _Your mama says..._

He dropped the Hyperion commander as though she'd scalded him. She fell to the ground, immediately scurrying for the revolver he'd foolishly let slip, but he stepped down on it first. He picked it up and tucked it into the waistband of his pants.

She grappled with him, clawing for the gun, but he grabbed her forearms and shoved her away. She sprawled back, hat tumbling off. Hair mussed, face turned away, she looked a helluva lot like Amanda, enough to hurt Brick's heart a little. She picked up the wide-brimmed hat and calmly donned it. Brick stepped forward and reached out to her.

She flinched away, expecting to be hit rather than helped to her feet. She met Brick's gaze but didn't take his hand. Her fingers fluttered to her bruised throat, and her gaze softened. She licked her lips.

"You want something else?" She croaked. "You want me to suck you off?"

Brick recoiled. He was horrified by the juxtoposition of her offer, sickening to him anyways, against his thoughts about how she looked like Amanda. He couldn't speak for a moment.

She inched forward on her knees. "You can still kill me, if you want. I don't expect honor any better from a bandit," she crooned, reaching up for his belt.

"No!" he finally said, and stepped out of her reach. "And I'm not a bandit."

"You want to fuck me, then?" Still, the Lawbringer drew closer. "I can't exactly stop you. Who knows? It might be fun. I've always kind of thought about it. Being forced by a bandi-"

"I'm not a bandit!" he repeated, and when she fumbled again for his belt, he slapped her across the face. A long moment passed. She looked down, face hidden under the brim of her hat.

When she looked up, Brick saw that he'd split her lip with one of his rings. Her face was bloody from nostril to her chin. She might have a scar later- a mirror image of his.

"Fag," she snapped, surprising Brick. "Big dumb cocksucker, don't know what to do with a lady."

"Don't see no ladies here, marm," he quoted, another line from the western, surprising himself this time. It was the antagonist's line.

She laughed: A short, sharp bleat, like she hadn't meant to, but had been caught off-guard. "What the fuck do you want? Don't draw it out. Just kill me if you're going to."

"I don't wanna kill you," he said, not sure if it was the truth.

"You trying to send a message? You want me to tell Jack something?" She guessed.

That sounded good to Brick. It sounded better than... whatever the truth was. That seeing Amanda, even the ghostlike impression of her, brought back all the old hurt, all the helplessness. That he'd looked into the Lawbringer's eyes and seen his own, and not wanted to be the animal towering over her. Not wanting to be the one to split her lip.

And maybe, too, he hoped to emerge back into the sunlight instead of the Other Place.

"Yeah," he said. "A message."

"Well?" she asked, clambering to her feet, staying a respectful distance from Brick.

"What?"

"What's the message, dummy?"

"Oh. Just, you know, what I said before. That I ain't a bandit. None of us are bandits. Except for Bool, but I think he's with us now, so..." He was rambling, and the Lawbringer cocked an eyebrow. "What's your name?" he asked.

The smile fell away. She seemed like she might not answer, but then she did. "Nisha."

"Why'd you dress like the Lawbringer, Nisha?"

She shrugged, averting her gaze. "She's a bad-ass. She gets her way, and no-one owns her. Does it surprise you that I like her? I think every girl does."

"My sister did," Brick confided. "She liked how the Lawbringer was fair, too. She never did nothin to folks who didn't have it coming."

"If you think you'll win my sympathy, you're fooling yourself," Nisha said, but still didn't meet his eyes. "I chose this get-up a long time ago. If I gave a shit about fairness, I don't anymore."

"So you won't give the message?" Brick asked.

"Of course I will. You got me dead to rights," she said, raising her hands to show that she was unarmed and overpowered.

"If I let you go, I won't know if you did it or not."

"Cant get anything past you, can I, big guy? That's true. You'll just have to trust me." She hooked her thumbs into the pockets of her blue jeans. "Or you can kill me."

"No."

She smiled under the brim of her hat. "Too bad we're on different sides. I love dummies like you... Guys who think they can save the world." She tried to touch Brick again, but he stepped away.

"Stay here for now. If I see you again before I'm gone, I'll hafta... you know," he told her.

Nisha nodded, still smirking. Brick wondered if he made a mistake.

He looked around for a way out of the cave and found the mouth of the tunnel they'd emerged from, not too high up the wall. He might be able to reach it. He crossed the cavern to the wall, and found that his hunch was correct.

Brick placed his palms against the tunnel floor and levered himself up with considerable upper body strength. The Lawbringer might have a harder time with it, but she should have thought about that before.  _Now what, though?_ He took one last, long look at Nisha, reliving the sting of disappointment. He turned and headed down the passageway.

He held Pyra but didn't fire her. Brick became aware of the tunnel lightening slightly, just enough the see the most jagged outcroppings. The path twisted ahead, and as he rounded the curve, he nearly had a heart attack. Faintly glowing runes floated in the air.

He raised the SMG, and almost pulled the trigger before a voice echoed through the tunnel. "Hey! Who's there?" He recognized the voice as Lilith's.

"It's me," Brick said.

"Oh God! I almost killed you!" Lilith burst out laughing.

"Same."

"Brick? Is it just you?" Roland asked, from somewhere in the darkness beyond Lilith.

"Yep. But, uh... I left the Commander alive. Told her that we want a cease fire on civilians, and to pass it on to her boss." Had he said that, though? At the very least, Brick was confident that she'd understood his message.

Nobody spoke. Brick could imagine Roland's face without seeing it. He would be disapproving.

"Was it...?" asked another voice, and Brick was relieved to hear Mordecai. The man sounded weary, but at least he was alive, and miraculously with them. "Was it her?" he finished.

"No," Brick said.

"I don't think we should allow her to live," Roland said. "She's dangerous-"

"If I killed her, they'd just replace her! They'll just send more and more until we're all dead," Brick said.

"He's got a point," Lilith added. "We want peace, but Hyperion doesn't, and they can draw out this war forever. They have the credits, and the men. We can't win with brute force. Maybe they can be reasoned with."

Roland sighed. "Fine. We're probably going to die down here, anyway."

"Why'd you follow me?" Brick asked.

"I don't know. My brain is still cooked from earlier," Roland admitted. "But I'm sure Hyperion's gathered their forces outside."

"I was thinking about that," Bool's voice said. Everyone had packed into the tunnel like sardines. Brick's palms still felt clammy in the enclosed space, but not nearly as bad as before. At least Mordecai was here, Mordecai and the others, so he wasn't alone.

Bool continued. "I saw'r what you did to that cocksuckin' constructor, Lilith. A little witchery, right? Moved it?"

"I guess. I've never done that before. I think... I think it had to do with the purple stuff they shot me with. I feel charged. Like I had a dead battery my whole life and someone put in a new one, you know? The ground started shaking, and I knew it was going to do that thing again, and I just... I was thinking... if it were just a  _foot closer to the edge_ , it would fall over. Then it was closer, and it fell. You think I did that?"

"You're a siren," Mordecai pointed out. "You do crazy shit all the time."

"That's true."

"Think you could do it again, but move us?" Bool asked.

"No way! I... I don't even know how it works! What if we get stuck in between here and there, in some void? Or space? What if-"

"Ain't no time for doubt, girl. We got no choice but to try." Bool cleared his throat. "'course, that ain't my call to make. That's for the commander."

Roland didn't reply right away, and Brick became aware of someone breathing heavily in the dark. "Frank?"

The skag chuffed, and everyone said things like 'ow' and 'oomph', until Brick felt a bumpy muzzle press into his palm, and a long, prehensile tongue wrap around his arm. "Good boy!" Brick exclaimed, and scratched the pet's chin.

"Lil, I think Bool's right. We can't go back the way we came," Roland said. As if to emphasize his point, the clacking joints of a loader could be heard from the direction of the pit.

"I don't know... fuck. Fine. Everyone hold hands. Brick, hold Frank too. Mordecai? You got Bloodwing?"

"Yeah."

Brick enfolded Lilith's much smaller hand in his own, and grabbed Frank's plated back with the other. He could hear rustling as his friends groped around in the dark. "Everyone got someone?" Lilith asked. They all said that they did. "Okay. This feels really stupid. It's not even going to- Well. I'm going to do it now."

Nothing happened for a long moment. When something did, it was just her tattoos glowing brighter, bright enough that Brick could actually see her face, and then the rest of the people lined up in the narrow tunnel. Frank wedged against Lilith, while she held Brick's and Roland's hands in hers. Roland held Mordecai's hand, and he held Bool's, who held Andy's. They stared at each other grimly. Only Lilith and Bool had closed their eyes.

When they went, they went fast. It reminded Brick of the sensation of riding an elevator that drops too quickly, so your stomach lurches into your chest, but even less intense. Just a mildly uncomfortable blink, really.

They stood inside New Haven's main gate. The sun blared high overhead, blessedly hot, and Brick could see his own apartment, and was surprised to discover how much he missed it. For the first time since he settled there, it looked like home. Everyone withdrew their hands.

Bloodwing launched herself from Mordecai's shoulder and into the air, where she circled overhead. It must have been hard for her to be confined to the tunnel. Frank gazed around, panting. His muzzle had stopped bleeding. There was still a hole, but it looked smaller. Even the bullet wound in his haunch had puckered and shrunk. Brick wondered if skags both healed and aged quickly, but even so... it had barely been an hour.

"Whoah!" Lilith cried. "I thought I would try this first, before I tried, you know, just the surface. I meant to take us to the HQ. I must have been a little off... but... still! Pretty good!"

Bool slapped her on the back. "Damned good! I had a hunch you could do it."

"About your hunches," Roland said. "They seem reliable. You knew we'd need your help, too, right?"

"I get these premonitions. I feel 'em in my bones. Maybe because I'm old, maybe because I'm mad. But nine out of ten times is dead on," Bool said.

"That's a valuable talent. We could really use that the Crimson Raiders. I..." Roland glanced at Lilith. He always looked to her when he felt uncertain. She smiled, and he continued. "I'm sorry I treated you poorly before, Bool. We'd appreciate you around town. Even as a member of the Raiders, if you're interested."

"I'd like that, sir. I'd like that very much," Bool said, and the two shook hands.

Brick could hardly believe what he was hearing. He should have been glad. Bool had saved their lives, had saved Brick's twice, in fact. But his outrageous stories bothered him, and it bugged him that Roland didn't seem more concerned about it. The feeling itched under his skin like nanites, and it occurred to him that it might have been jealously, not suspicion, that rankled him.

Mordecai grinned. He'd liked Bool from the beginning, been drawn to him. Against his better nature, Brick resented it.

But the smile dropped from Mordecai's face, and he wobbled. Roland and Bool grabbed him by the arms to keep him from falling over. Brick darted forward, forgetting his concerns.

"Mordy?" Brick said, and raised his fingers to touch the sloppy stitches he'd put into the man's arm. They looked okay, not red or bleeding, anyway. He brushed them lightly.

"I'm fine. Just lost a lot of blood. I think... I better see Zed. Might need a transfusion," Mordecai said, leaning against Bool for balance.

"I can take you," Roland said.

Brick interrupted. "I'll take him. I gotta see the doc too." Not that his wounds bothered him much. Even the one through his leg only burned- if he hadn't felt the bullet plunge into his flesh, he might have thought it was a bad rash. He thought of Mordecai saying how he didn't regret his past because it made him stronger. Brick could thank his own childhood for a high pain tolerance.

"That'd be good," Mordecai said. Brick shifting the woozy man's weight to his shoulder.

"Do you need anyone to go with you?" Lilith asked. Her tattoos had stopped glowing, and deep circles of exhaustion ringed her eyes.

"No, we're good. Frank'll come too," Brick said. The skag looked over at the mention of his name. "The nanites wont work on him, but maybe Zed can patch him up."

"Yeesh. I'm sure he'll love that," said Andy. It was the first thing he'd said. The jump seemed to have rattled him. His face had taken on a greenish hue, and he clutched his stomach like he might throw up.

"Zed'll be fine. He's a professional. I think so, anyway. And Frank's a Raider now, so we gotta take care of him. Right, bud?" Brick asked. The skag stood up and wagged its rear end.

"If you're sure you'll be okay, we'll get back to HQ and start reports," Roland said.

Lilith chuckled, wrapped an arm around his waist, and kissed him on the cheek. "After a nap."

Roland blushed, but smiled. "Uh... yeah. A nap sounds nice."

Brick said goodbye to his friends and they split off, headed for their separate destinations. He could hear the other four, chatting and laughing like old friends.

When they turned the first corner, Brick paused in the shadow of a building to wrap his arms around Mordecai's waist. He pushed the smaller man against the wall and kissed him on the mouth, deeply, overcome by happiness- because they'd made it out of the darkness, and because everyone had survived.

"What was that for?" Mordecai asked when Brick released him.

Brick shrugged. "I like you. Got a problem with that?"

"Nope, no complaints."

Brick tried to kiss him again, but Mordecai shoved him away, laughing. "Come on, you big dope, I'm going to pass out. I don't have enough blood for you to be... redistributing it."

Brick grinned, and they continued onto Zed's shop, Frank lumbering beside them.


	16. Dogs in the Moonlight

Brick kissed the back of Mordecai's neck in the darkness, one arm draped around the smaller man's waist. The sun was still out but they had drawn the blinds so they could lay in the dark, naked, half-tangled in blankets. Brick's drunken, smacking kisses were loud in the quiet bedroom, and Mordecai gasped as the clumsy mouthing became a bite.

"Hey, take it easy," he murmured, drowsing despite Brick's hand wrapped loosely around his dick, stroking him with languorous, unhurried rhythm.

"You're easy," Brick replied nonsensically.

Mordecai reached back to slap the other man's side, like swatting at a bothersome fly. "You idiot- you- uhnf," he said, finishing the thought with a groan as the idiot in question kissed his ear, blowing a hot huff of breath into its shell.

"Why'm I jerkin' you off, anyway?" Brick slurred.

"Because I brought the booze."

"Nah. That ain't it." The room swooned around him when he tried to think about it. The ceiling shifted, shuffled; like birds moving in the rafters of a barn.

"Because my arm doesn't fit around you as well," Mordecai tried again.

"But.. You should be... tryin' to cheer me up. Right?" Brick said. He wasn't sure what he was saying, was too drunk to even understand the words slipping out of his own mouth. Mordecai didn't reply right away, but did respond. That is, the length in Brick's hand seemed a little limper- suddenly more leather than steel.

"What, this isn't cheering you up?" Mordecai joked halfheartedly.

It was Brick's turn to not respond.

Mordecai sighed and shrugged Brick away. He shifted, the bed protesting with a squall of old springs, and faced the other man. In the dark, Brick could only make out the muzzy outlines of his face. His loose dreads looked like a pool of blood against the pillow.

"You wanna talk about it?" Mordecai asked.

"No," Brick snuffled. They already had. Mordecai had showed up at noon with the booze, ready to be Brick's shoulder to cry on. By the time they staggered into bed a few hours later, talked out and listlessly horny, they'd gone through the entire case of beer. Brick thought he'd gotten it out of his system, but the pain went deeper, like poison from a dirty wound. It disturbed all the old hurts that he'd tried so hard to tuck away.  _Like putting an octopus to bed_ , his dad would have said.

It was a few weeks after the Hyperion mission went awry. They'd all basically recovered from their injuries. Brick even thought that he'd started to move past the disappointment of finding Nisha instead of Amanda, but this recent thing... this pain... it rattled all his cages.

And Mordecai hadn't wanted to talk about Nisha when he brought it up. He'd changed the topic.

"At least you didn't have to... you know. What Roland wanted to do," he said.

Instead of making Brick feel better, that pissed him off. "Fuck Roland," Brick said, his nails digging into Mordecai's hip.

"Forget Roland. Fuck me instead," Mordecai said.

"No," Brick said, still pissed. "I- he-  _fuck_  him. 'kay? It was none of his business."

"Brick, come on. Andy's a Raider. He could have died. You wanna tell me that's none of Roland's business?"

"Why are you siding with that bastard? This 's between me an' Andy. Not you, and not that... that... fuck!" Brick squeezed his eyes closed, and when they opened again, he was horrified to feel a tumble of fat tears spill out and patter against the pillow.

"I know you're upset-"

"You don' know shit. You and Roland... you..." Brick interrupted. The imaginary starlings in the ceiling exploded into flight, filled his head with their whispering wings, disturbing his animal into a hot, slick slide that made Brick feel like throwing up. He gripped his necklace- the paw, specifically- and tried to hold on, hold on.

* * *

When Brick woke up later, his head throbbed. His mouth tasted like an ashtray full of vomit.

He reached for Mordecai but found the bed empty. That was fine. Brick grabbed the other man's pillow, pulling it close.  _He was being a dick anyway,_ he thought. A strange, cloying smell hung in the are. He sniffed the metallic scent and suddenly knew, with a lurch not unlike the sensation of phasing, that the smell was blood.

The pillow in his arms was wet.

Brick sat up. Hideous pressure filled his head and nearly knocked him back down. He clutched his temples and tried to steady the world rocking around him.

"Mordy?" Brick said. Afraid he wouldn't answer, afraid that we would.

 _No cellar this time,_  he thought, rubbing the necklace's key between thumb and forefinger.  _No momma to clean up the mess..._

There came no reply, but now Brick noticed the steady shush of water from somewhere else in the house. He stood up, not bothering to pull any clothes over his naked frame, and ambled into the hall, now as dark as the bedroom. Time had passed. Only a strip of light under the bathroom door illuminated the apartment.

The bare soles of his feet stuck as he walked down the short stretch of hall, a tacky suck as he stepped in something sticky and tracked it across the floor. More blood. Brick's pulse slammed in his ears.

He eased the bathroom door open without knocking.

Mordecai stood at the sink with his back turned, but Brick could see his face in the mirror. Blood ran over his lips and streaked his beard. Tissues littered the sink and floor, blotched red and pink. Brick saw his own reflection behind Mordecai in the mirror and barely recognized himself. He looked like a hulking, gray-faced monster, with dark rings under his eyes and another man's gore smeared across his cheek.

His reflection gazed back at him with reptilian disinterest.

"Brick," Mordecai said, spotting him in the mirror. "Sorry, I didn't think you'd wake up. You passed ou- hey... are you alright?" He turned around.

Brick crossed the room.  _Tak, tak, tak,_  went his sticky feet against the tile. Tears rolled, unbidden, down his face.

"Bloody nose," Mordecai explained. "I get them sometimes. I'll clean everything up, though, I swear."

"Bloody nose," Brick whispered, scarcely daring to believe it.

"Yeah. Why, what'd you think? That you punched me in your sleep, or something?"

Brick's face crumpled and he embraced the surprised man, not caring about the blood or their awkward nudity under the buzzing florescent lights. He was too relieved to care.

" _Mi pata de perro,_ " Mordecai murmured against his neck, arms snaking up to wrap around Brick's broad back. "Sorry. I didn't mean to scare you."

Brick's knees felt loose. "Come back to bed."

"I can't, I have to clean up."

"Tomorrow."

"I'll ruin the sheets."

"They're already fucked up. Just pull 'em off."

"Then I'll ruin the mattress!"

Brick growled and hooked a hand around the back of Mordecai's head, dragging him into a kiss that tasted like old pennies. Then, while Mordecai was relaxed against him, he wrapped his hands around that narrow waist, crouched, and lifted, slinging Mordecai up over his shoulder.

"Hey!"

Brick didn't reply except to let out a laugh, a relieved burst of joy, and turn around in the small bathroom, being careful not to slip on the blood. He carried Mordecai back to the bedroom and he tossed the wriggling, complaining bundle onto the bed. Mordecai oomphed.

"We really should take care of this mess. If someone busts in here tomorrow morning-"

"I'll shoot 'em for trespassing," Brick said, and dispelled further arguments with another deep kiss. He pushed Mordecai down on the bed. The smaller man didn't argue this time, only wriggled underneath him, delightfully alive and naked, and Brick lapped at the pulse fluttering in his throat.

Mordecai groaned and arched to bring his groin flush with Brick's. "Round two?"

"Huh? Shouldn't we start with round one?"

"Uh, we did. Earlier. You don't remember? Did you black out?"

"I guess. I just remember us fightin. I thought my animal...Never mind."

"What? Your animal?"

Brick planted a trail of husky kisses down Mordecai's neck. "I don't wanna talk about it."

"Please? I told you all that crazy shit about my dad."

Brick didn't respond but tried to capture the other man's mouth again, only to be pushed away.

"Talk to me," Mordecai insisted.

"Pick, pick, pick," Brick grumbled, and rolled away, so they lay side by side on the narrow bed. "Fine. What d'you wanna know?"

"What is your animal? I've heard you mention it before, but..." Brick couldn't see in the darkness, but felt Mordecai shrug against his shoulder. "You don't talk. It makes me feel like a girl, trying to drag everything outta you."

"Uh-huh. That's what makes you feel like a girl. Not cos' you always want to be the bottom."

"I could be with a woman if I just wanted to get my dick wet. There's some stuff you need a man for," Mordecai said.

"Really? I thought..." Brick wasn't sure what he'd thought, exactly. "I didn't know you liked that."

Mordecai snorted. "No, when you're fucking me, I cum out of disgust. And... you're trying to change the topic."

Brick's dick had begun to take an interest in the conversation, but now it relaxed. "You're killin' the mood."

"Brick."

"Fine! My animal... It's..." the words felt thick in his throat, tacky, like blood. He'd never tried to tell anyone about that devil he'd been born with, the second self that haunted him with bouts of overprotective rage. What could he say? That it saved him, that it tormented him? That it guarded his memories with a cool flash of teeth?

Mordecai grabbed his hand, and their fingers intertwined. Brick took a deep breath.

"You know how I'm dumb and mean?" he asked, but continued before Mordecai could argue. "I was always like that. I was born that way. My momma tried to teach me stuff and show me books, but I couldn't pay attention. I'd get frustrated. That's how I got called Brick...Cos' I was thick as, well, you know. I always used to get mad and throw stuff, and run away, and get in fights. I was a bad kid. My momma said it's 'cos I was born with the devil in me. She said it makes me meaner than other folks, makes me bad and dumb. I dunno if that's true, but I do got something inside me, like an animal. It tries to keep me safe. When I get worked up, it just... it walks. And I don't remember things while it's out. You seen it before. You seen my animal walk."

"Yeah, I've seen it," Mordecai said, so softly that could Brick barely hear him in the silent room.

"You think I'm a monster."

"No," Mordecai said quickly. "Hell no. I think you're mom is a bitch. Telling her own kid that he's got the devil living in him..."

"I told you, I was a bad kid. I wasn't easy like Amanda."

"God, do you hear yourself?" Mordecai asked, his voice trembling. "You think that's okay? To make your kid feel like an idiot, like a monster?"

"You don't get it," Brick said. He couldn't find the words. To explain would be to confess the truth about the cellar and the boy with car-door ears, and he would never do that.

Mordecai squeezed his hand. "You're not dumb, or mean. You cried because you thought you'd hurt me. A mean guy wouldn't do that." His lips found Brick's in the dark and planted a kiss there, so butterfly soft that Brick couldn't be sure of it. "You're good. Your momma should have loved you."

Brick thought of Mordecai's parents- his unstable father and absent mother- and almost understood. "Yours too."

For awhile they were quiet, holding hands in the dark. Brick dozed.

"Brick isn't your real name?" Mordecai asked, startling Brick awake.

"No. Who would name their kid Brick?"

"Well, I don't know! What's your real name?"

Brick hesitated. "Promise not to laugh?"

Mordecai's pinky formed a hook in Brick's hand, sought and found the other man's little finger _._  "I swear."

"Maurice."

True to his word, Mordecai didn't laugh. "I like it. Can I call you that?"

"Don'chu dare," Brick said, his ears burning.

"Maury, then?"

"No, that's even worse. Call me somethin else if you don't like Brick. What'd you call me in the bathroom?

" _Pata de perro_?" Mordecai asked.

"Yeah. What's that mean?"

"It's hard to explain. It literally translates to dog's paw," Mordecai said, and his hand came up to wrap around Pris's paw, knuckling Brick's chest. "But it means something like, somebody who wanders. Somebody who doesn't have a home. Both of us are like that, I guess. But...this is embarrassing. It's kind of my nickname for you. I never said it out loud because...that's couple stuff, right? Pet names?"

So was kissing, and fucking, and sharing secrets, but Brick didn't argue.

"Anyway, I think of you as my  _pata de perro._ Because you like dogs, and your necklace, and, I don't know. It just suits you. I know. I'm gay."

Brick grinned against Mordecai's lips, warmed by the burn across the other man's cheeks. "You're friggin adorable."

"Whatever. I do like Brick, by the way. I think I'll just call you that. Or babe," Mordecai said. "Okay, enough. This mushy shit is going to give me another nose bleed. Round two?"

Brick liked that idea. He tried to comply, but for whatever reason- his lingering buzz, probably, or stress- he couldn't rekindle the fire. Instead, they kissed until Mordecai fell asleep in his arms, sheets still smucked and rumpled beneath them.

Brick prayed dutifully while he thumbed the key on his necklace. He should have felt better after confessing to Mordecai about his animal and the nasty business of his childhood, but he didn't. He thought he deserved some relief for the effort it took.

Instead, in the cool, dark bedroom, with his lover snoring in his arms, Brick felt as though something was moving in for the kill.


	17. Trust

Two weeks later, Brick and Mordecai stepped out of the sunlight and into the dim interior of Doctor Zed's office.

The smell of blood and antiseptic washed over Brick, making him cringe. Andy sat on a metal gurney, shivering, wearing nothing but his underpants. He clutched his bandaged arm with the other. He looked very pathetic and alone. He straightened up when they walked in, and flashed a weak smile. Zed stood across the room, washing his hands at the sink, back turned.

"Hey, kid," Brick said.

"Hello sir," Andy replied. Mordecai followed Brick in the door and waved, and the young raider waved back. Nobody said anything for a moment.

"You doing okay?" Brick asked.

"Yes sir. Zed says I'll heal up fine," Andy said.

Zed looked over his shoulder and pulled the surgical mask down across his face. "It was quite a thrashing, though. I was impressed. He took the stitches well. Only cried a little bit this time."

Brick grinned and clapped a hand on Andy's uninjured shoulder. "That's great! I'm proud of you."

Mordecai cleared his throat.

"Oh, yeah," Brick said. "Uh... you know I'm sorry, right?"

"Yeah, I know," Andy said.

"We're going further out of town this time."

Fear flickered across Andy's face. "I thought... Roland said..."

"Roland's an idiot. It'll be fine. We'll drive out to the Enclave, maybe, or even Hero's Pass. He can't make it back from there," Brick explained. He was aware of Mordecai angling himself away, and how he didn't meet Andy's gaze. It bothered Brick. Mordecai had come to support him, but he wasn't helping at all. It was making him feel like a fool.

"I... if you say so, sir," Andy said.

He didn't need to remind Brick what would happen if it failed. This was the second time that Frank mauled the young Raider. That might have been alright if he'd been the skag's only target, but he wasn't, not by a long-shot. Frank lashed out anybody he met with increasing ferocity. Victims of his tempestuous nature kept Zed's office hopping over the past couple months, on and off, whenever he arrived back to New Haven.

Brick said goodbye, and exited the building with Mordecai in tow.

"Thanks for helping back there," he said bitterly.

"I didn't know what to say! I... I'm starting to think Roland's right about this,  _amigo._ Frank's a wild animal. Now that he's attached to you..."

"So it's my fault? Now he's gotta die, just because I took him in?"

"That's not what I meant. He probably would have died as a pup anyways, without his mother. Maybe this is just the reaper catching up to him."

That sounded like something Bool would say. Mordecai and the older man had become close since he'd moved into town. Brick wouldn't say he was jealous, exactly, but... well, fuck, who was he kidding?

"Whatever," he growled. "This'll work, I'm telling you."

"I hope so," Mordecai said.

"You going with, to drop him off?" Brick asked.

"If you want me."

Brick didn't have to say that he did. He always wanted Mordecai, and as long as Brick didn't tell him different, he would be there.

They crossed New Haven and left out the side entrance, where they'd left Frank chained to a rust-flecked shipping container. He paced circles around the area, wandering as far out as the heavy chains allowed. His claws left deep tracks in the dirt. The plants had all died within a day of the storm, so Pandora looked the same as the first time Brick laid eyes on it. The pitiless sun glared down on them. Heat radiated off the ground, making everything waver.

Just outside of Frank's range stood two young girls, one light, one dark, standing with their backs to Brick. He recognized them both. The pale girl had escaped from a Hyperion testing facility a couple months ago and found her way to the Raiders. They'd gone back to rescue her parents, but by the time they arrived, both were dead. The girl's name was Tina. She'd taken a liking to Brick immediately. Sometimes she followed him around town, asking questions about his guns, or talking about tea parties or television, and other mind-numbingly childish topics, but Brick liked her, too.

He didn't know the other girl's name. He recognized her as the stray who wore his sister's necklace. Brick held a finger to his lips, hushing Mordecai, and they crept up behind the girls.

"HEY," he boomed when he'd gotten close. "You buggin' my dog?"

They jumped so far that they nearly landed within Frank's reach. The stray whipped around with a furious expression, while Tina grinned and punched Brick in the gut. Her small fist sent ripples through his energy shield.

"Dayam, Big! You scared the shizz out of me. Hey, what's the occasion?" Tina asked, pointing at his shield emitter. Brick didn't want to tell her that Frank's behavior had become so unpredictable that even he had to be careful, so he shrugged.

"Gotta take the dog out. Never know what we'll run into," he said.

Mordecai locked gazes with the skag and clicked his tongue. Frank snarled. Tina socked Brick in the shield again. Then, grinning, she assaulted him with a flurry of kicks and punches. He waited. The dark girl rolled her eyes, but smiled.

"There," Tina said at last, panting. "How'd I do?"

Brick checked the read-out on his shield. "One notch."

"OOOOOOHHH DOOOOOO-! Best yet!" She bounced up and down.

"Brick!" Roland yelled, shockingly loud against the still Pandora afternoon.

"Uh-oh," Mordecai muttered. "Dad's pissed. Scram, kids."

The girls bounded away like a pair of feral cats, but only disappeared behind the shipping container, where they could eavesdrop.

"Did you tell Andy that you were going to drive Frank out again?" Roland said when he reached the two men.

"That pussy tattled already, huh?" Brick said.

"That's a hell of a thing to say about a man who's nearly been killed twice by your negligence," Roland said.

"It wouldn't happen if he wasn't such a wimp. That guy couldn't fight his way out of a wet paper bag."

"What about the others, huh? The civilians?"

Brick didn't have a response for that. It was bad, he knew. That was why he agreed to release Frank back into the wild. He couldn't help that the skag kept finding his way back to New Haven.

"Go worry about somethin' else. Everyone's asking when the water's gonna be turned back on, you know. You gonna deal with that?" Brick said.

Roland sighed. "You know what has to happen. Zed's got that device, it could do it painlessly."

"No."

"What if he really hurts someone next time, or kills them? You want that on your conscience?" Roland asked. He pointedly avoided eye contact with the skag, even though Frank strained toward him, rear end wagging. It broke Brick's heart.

"It won't happen again. I'll go further out. Please," he begged, hating the desperation in his voice.

"I... uh... No. I believed that last time, and look what happened. Frank's gotta be put down-"

"Murdered, you mean," Brick said.

"You're such a child!" Roland snapped. "This is why I couldn't trust you with the Lawbringer. You let your damn emotions take over."

"You know why I let her live! To send a-"

"A message, I know. You said. But it doesn't seem like she passed it on, does it? If anything, Hyperion's been more aggressive, and I can't deal with this mess on top of that. Mordecai, help me out. You know I'm right," Roland said.

Mordecai looked uncomfortable. "Brick... you know how I feel." He stared at Frank, his expression inscrutable behind the goggles.

"You're ganging up on me! You're always ganging up on me."

"We're not," Roland said. "Damnit, Brick! Everything we've done, it's been to protect you. You're just too pig-headed to see it."

Something about that phrase- 'everything we've done'- stuck in Brick's head like a splinter. He stared at the ground, too angry to speak, and picked at it. An image occurred to him.

Sparks. Blue sparks as a sniper round slammed into an energy shield. Static rippling across the Lawbringer's body. That bullet had been meant for the Constructor, hadn't it? But Mordecai never missed. The second shot, intended to shatter the remaining shield, had been stopped by Nisha. If it hadn't...

In Brick's memory, he couldn't see the Lawbringer's face. It had been hidden under the brim of her hat.

He looked up at Mordecai. He didn't meet his gaze.

"You...  _planned_  together, before we went to check out the Enclave. Didn't you?" Brick spat the word 'planned' like a curse. "You were gonna kill the Lawbringer, even if she was Amanda?"

Mordecai said nothing.

Roland replied instead. "She was a murderer. You saw what she did to Peterson, you heard how she massacred the scouting unit. If-" but Brick ignored him, his eyes fixed on Mordecai's profile. He grabbed the shorter man's shoulder and spun him around to face him.

"That was the plan, right? Just say it!"

"...Yeah."

Brick shoved him away, disgusted. He looked at Frank. The skag returned his gaze, and Brick got the familiar feeling that he could see his animal rising to the surface, cresting on the tide of his rage. His animal looked out and saw the skag, now larger than Brick, now the size of two Bricks, and retreated. It wasn't scared. It had faced more terrible opponents. Something else about Frank drove it back, had always driven it back.

Mordecai tried to put a hand on Brick's shoulder, but he pulled away. "Brick, I just didn't... I didn't want you to have to... I'm sorr-"

"Shut up," Brick cut him off. He realized that he was touching his necklace, and forced himself to lower his arms. Forced himself not to cry.

Roland cleared his throat. "I hate to do this, but we still have to deal with Frank. You don't have to be there. I could take him to Zed's for you."

 _Andy would watch,_ Brick thought.  _He'd be happy. He'd probably be happier if I were put down, too._

A small face poked out from behind the shipping container. It was the stray girl.

"Sorry for eavesdropping, but I wanna ask something," she said.

Roland looked surprised. "Uh... sure."

"Couldn't he drive past Sanctuary? Wouldn't that be far enough?" the girl said.

"What do you know about Sanctuary?" Roland asked.

"My mom used to be in the Lance, so we moved around a lot. I remember that town. It was nice, and real far out, days and days. And there were even further places where nobody lives. Like, old Dahl places? Something like that. I was little. But I'm sure there's somewhere you could drop Frank, and there's no way he could make it all the way back through the Fathoms."

"Yeah, that ain't a bad idea," Brick said, feeling hopeful. "I'd drive him out there myself."

Roland didn't say anything right away. Brick almost asked again, when the commander finally said, "Alright. Fine. But if that skag comes back, I'll finish it myself."

He turned and headed back toward the town, which didn't look much like home, anymore. Brick couldn't even look at Mordecai. After a moment, the sniper turned and followed Roland without another word. He'd known Brick long enough to realize that nothing he could say would make a difference now.

Still, Brick wished he would try.

The children came out from behind the container, stumbling over each other like kittens.

"Thanks," Brick said to the girl who he'd stolen the necklace from.

"No problem. I like Frank. I like his piercing," she said. She was talking about the bullet hole in his maw. Brick smiled.

"What's your name, kid?" he asked.

"Kindle. Yours?"

"I tol' you already, that's Big!" said Tina, and grabbed his arm. He raised the arm and flexed, lifted her clear of the ground, and she swung on it like a bullymong.

"It's Brick," he said.

"Well, you better get out of here, Brick. I don't wanna see nothing bad happen to Frank," Kindle said. Compassion glittered in her eyes, now the color of dry blood.

"Yeah. Guess I'll get goin'," he agreed.

He let Tina down, ruffled her hair, and went over to unchain Frank. He lunged at Brick when he entered the circle, and for a moment he thought that he meant to attack him, but he only leaned against his master's side. He almost shoved Brick over with his weight, but romped away, kicking up sand.

Brick unclasped the chain from the shipping container and wrapped it around one fist. The girls said goodbye, they were going back to town, and he waved to them as they vanished over the hill.

He pulled from his pocket the modified HUD that Helena Pierce gave each of the Raiders after the Hyperion incident. His thumb grazed the activation button. A hologram sprang to life before him, startling Frank.

"It's okay, buddy. It's not real. See?" Brick stuck his hand out to show Frank how his fingers phased through the image, trailing a wake of disturbed pixels. The skag stopped growling, but remained tense. Brick studied the projected map.

He scanned the image, eyes darting, finger flicking to make it to show another area, then another, then another, and finally stopped. He studied a part of the display. The location was far out, probably a few days worth of driving, not that he minded. He wanted to be as far away from New Haven as possible. The HUD system didn't have much information about the area. It was out by the Dahlwell Oasis, or the Dust, as people called it now, and was labeled only as 'the old mine'. Not even capitalized. It would almost certainly be an abandoned Dahl site.

Brick patted the truck-bed for Frank to hop in. The skag jumped up obediently, and looked back at Brick. His expression could have been Pris's. He looked exactly the way she had, once, grinning at him with dumb trust in her eyes.

Brick prayed for things to be different this time.


	18. Onward

The story so far!

* * *

**Stray**

While heading home to his apartment in New Haven, Brick stumbles on some teenagers harassing a girl in an alleyway. He chases them off, only to find that the girl somehow has his missing sister's key, the twin to his own. She says it used to belong to her mother. Brick steals the key. Instead of going home, he winds up at Mordecai's place. The two friends have no strings attached sex, following the arbitrary rules they'd previously agreed on- lights off, no kissing, no declarations of love- nothing too gay. Besides the man on man sex, of course.

**God-Given Right**

Brick has a fuck awful dream about human figures devouring a mountain of quivering, pulsating flesh. The figures tell him join them, to take his pleasures in the kingdom of man, because he would go to the other place soon enough. A chilling rhyme closes out the nightmare;  _Brick the brawler, Brick the strong, your momma says you came out wrong..._

**Coincidence**

The Crimson Raider scouting unit- or what's left of it- returns to New Haven the next morning. The only survivor reports a new Hyperion occupation in the Enclave, and a female commander who calls herself 'the Lawbringer', before he dies of his injuries. Brick thinks about his little sister's favorite movie, an old western about a gunslinger babe by the same name, and wonders if it could be a coincidence.

**Animal**

Brick and Mordecai drive through the Rust Commons, searching for any Hyperion assholes who might have followed the injured Raider. They argue about whether or not the Lawbringer could be Amanda's missing sister. Mordecai doesn't want him to get his hopes up. The fight escalates, Brick storms off, and Mordecai ditches him. A badass fire skag attacks Brick, wounding him and releasing his secret ally- a powerful, nearly invulnerable personality that he calls 'his animal'. Under his animal's control, Brick kills the badass skag, but then collapses from blood loss. The last thing he sees before he passes out is a skag pup.

**Wake up, Jacob**

Brick wakes briefly to discover that he's been rescued. Mordecai watches over him, along with another man- a mysterious stranger with a bristling white beard, and eyes like silver dollars.

**Eden**

A long-ass flashback that reveals the troubled nature of Brick's relationship with his religious momma. She's physically and verbally abusive toward him, giving him the nickname Brick because he is 'as thick as a brick'; her response to his undiagnosed dyslexia. Also: Brick stands up for animals, is bullied by other kids, and is locked in a dark cellar by his momma. Finally, Brick contemplates first panel (a depiction of Eden) of the biblical triptych that terrified him as a kid, and haunts him still- The Garden of Earthy Delights.

**Bool**

Brick learns that he was rescued by a bandit named Bool, the stranger from before, and that he's recovering from his injuries in the bandit's home. He reunites with the docile skag pup, which Bool had confused for Brick's pet. The bandit tells Brick and Mordecai about his time in the Lance, and how they'd attempted to execute him because of his fugues; a mental disconnect that causes him to 'go away' and become vegetative. He recounts how his fellow soldiers died in battle while he stood idly by. Mordecai and Brick spend the night in Bool's shack while microscopic nanites repair Brick's injuries.

**Foogs**

A clusterfuck of exposition. Brick and Mordecai wander through the bandit clan junkyard and talk about things. Mordecai reveals that his father was a paranoid schizophrenic, and Brick wonders if his own 'animal' might be something like Bool's fugues. Roland and Lilith find them, and Lilith gives Mordecai a rash of shit about letting Brick get hurt. Bool sees them off after a tense encounter with Roland. The four Vault Hunters (and one skag pup) depart for New Haven.

**Grown Up**

When they arrive in town, the girl that Brick rescued from bullies is waiting for them. She tattles on Brick for stealing her necklace, and Roland demands that he return the key. Brick does, but then gets into an argument with Roland, who he perceives as treating him like a child. He storms off to Marcus's gun shop with Mordecai. While Brick is haggling for weapons, Mordecai slips out to talk to Moxxi. Brick looks out the door just in time to see them kissing.

**Barring Incident**

The four vault hunters (and Brick's skag pup) set out for the Enclave to investigate the report of Hyperion occupation. Hyperion loaders ambush them, and a sandstorm engulfs the skirmish. The four friends lose each other in the confusion. Brick is claustrophobic and begins to panic in the thick clouds of dust, until Mordecai stumbles across him and leads him to the safety of a cave.

**The Apple**

Brick and Mordecai reunite with the skag pup, and they decide to wait out the dangerous storm. They talk and drink for awhile before venturing deeper into the cave. There, they come across a chamber full of mysterious glowing, purple ore, which gives Brick the creeps and makes Mordecai trip balls. He zones out and rants about radiation and tin totems. When he snaps out of it, Brick asks him what the hell happened, but Mordecai doesn't remember. Brick tells him about the rambling, and his response chills Brick.  _The apple don't fall from the tree..._

**The Tree**

Brick is worried, so Mordecai eventually tells him about his childhood. How his mother left when he was six, forcing him to take care of himself and his schitzophenic father, and about his father's radiation delusions. Somehow Mordecai winds up sitting in Brick's lap. He mentions Moxxi, and Brick acts jealous, so he demands to know what Brick wants from him. They kiss for the first time. Mordecai tries to kiss him again, but Brick's animal forces him to stop. He remembers how his first boyfriend went missing, and how his momma had been accused of murdering the boy. Although his momma is far away, Brick's deadly animal and the old adage about apples and trees make him feel too dangerous to be close to. Mordecai becomes frustrated. He slaps Brick, but they wind up having steamy off-screen sex anyway.

**Bloom**

The pair wake to discover that the storm is over, and the desert has bloomed. They wander through the sudden growth and find the pup again, who has miraculously become a full grown skag overnight. Brick names the skag Frank. A moonshot malfunction sends a broken loader crashing down to the planet. When Brick and Mordecai catch up to it, they see that a Hyperion base has been built in Rust Commons East. They spot a pair of Hyperion workers fiddling with a device that turns out to be Roland's turret. Guessing that their missing friends have been captured, they decide to infiltrate the base.

**Yellow and White**

After sneaking around for awhile, they hear a scream and follow it to a huge pit mine at the far end of the base. Roland and Lilith are there, held captive by two Hyperion commanders: a cyborg, and a woman dressed like the western heroine, the Lawbringer. When the vault hunters refuse to give them any information, they electrocute Roland and inject a glowing purple liquid into Lilith. Mordecai shoots the Lawbringer but fails to penetrate her shield. A constructor fires a laser at Mordecai, severing his arm.

**Out of the Blue**

Brick uses a medical kit to reattach Mordecai's arm, while Frank protects them from loaders. Brick leaves Mordecai to help Roland and Lilith below, and is surprised to find that Bool and a young Raider named Andy have already come out of nowhere to free them. After a brief battle, during which Lilith unknowingly uses her new teleportation power to push the constructor over a ledge, and I nearly go insane trying to write an action chapter, Brick spots the Lawbringer and pursues her into a taped off mineshaft.

**Below**

Brick catches up with the Lawbringer in a cavern. He discovers that she is not Amanda, after all, and nearly throttles her to death. The thought of his violent momma makes him spare the Lawbringer's life. He gives her a message to relay to her superiors; that the citizens of Pandora want peace. Brick leaves her unarmed in the cavern. On his way back through the tunnel, he runs into the other Raiders, and Lilith (reluctantly) uses a newly discovered siren power to transport all of them back to New Haven. Everybody is relieved to have not been turned inside out by the experimental teleportation, and Roland invites Bool to join the Crimson Raiders.

**Dogs in the Moonlight**

Three week later, Brick and Mordecai are drunk and having a lazy screw in the middle of the day. They argue, and Brick blacks out as the fight escalates. When he wakes up, he discovers Mordecai missing and his pillow drenched with blood. Brick thinks that his animal took control and that he hurt Mordecai, but he finds his friend in the bathroom, nursing an unrelated bloody nose. He tells Mordecai about his animal- that it came to him sometime during his childhood, and that it kept him safe from the bullies and his momma. Mordecai calls Brick his 'pata de perro', an affectionate nickname with a dual meaning: Dog's paw, and a person who wanders.

**Trust**

In the five weeks since the incident with Hyperion, Frank has been attacking people. After the second time he mauls Andy, Roland insists that they euthanize the skag, but Brick wants to try driving him out of town again. When Brick and Mordecai go to where Frank is chained up, they find two children keeping him company- the dark skinned girl that Brick stole the key from, and Tina, a girl who the Raiders rescued from a Hyperion laboratory. Roland arrives to argue with Brick. During the fight, Brick finds out that Mordecai and Roland conspired to kill the Lawbringer whether she was Amanda or not, and is devastated by Mordecai's betrayal. The girls interrupt to ask Roland if Brick could drive Frank further away, out past Sanctuary, and the Raider commander concedes to let him try. Brick learns that the other girl's name is Kindle. He chooses an old Dahl mine where he will leave Frank, and the first book ends with him beckoning the skag into the truck.

* * *

Whew! Thanks so much to anyone who has read this far. I appreciate it more than I can say.


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